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A Drop of Water 


By Margaret Horner Clyde 


Author of 

“The Thread That is Spun” 

and other stories 


EASTON, PA. 

THE CHEMICAL PUBLISHING COMPANY 

1923 


LONDON, ENGLANO: 

WILLIAMS * NORGATE 

14 HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN, W. C 


TOKYO, japan: 

MARUZEN COMPANY. LTD., 

11-16 NIHONBASHI TORI-6ANCHOME 




COPYRIGHT. 1923, BY EDWARD HART 



NOV 12 ?3 

© C1A759790 



A DROP OF WATER 


CHAPTER I 

Have you ever watched steam rising from the spout of 
a tea-kettle, Where does it come from? Where does it 
go? You say it comes from the water boiling in the 
kettle. But what makes the water boil? You tell me 
heat, of course, from the fire under it. 

My small friend Ted had never thought much about 
steam or fire until the day he went camping with Uncle 
Bob and Daddy. Of course, he had seen Nora, the maid, 
light the gas stove and put a kettle of fresh water on it 
to boil. And he had seen Mother pour Daddy’s coffee 
steaming hot into his cup at breakfast. But just what 
happened to make the kettle boil or the cup of coffee give 
off steam he did not know. But he began to think about 
it the day they went camping. 

It was a bright, cool day, just the day, Uncle Bob said, 
for the trout to bite. And Uncle Bob ought to know, 
for he went to college. And Daddy said that college boys 
knew everything there was to know—as well as a good 
deal that there wasn’t. Which Ted could not understand 
at all. Any more than he could understand why Daddy 
called Uncle Bob a college boy when he was just as tall 
as Daddy himself and could beat him any day at tennis. 


2 


A DROP OP WATER 


But Uncle Bob was right about the trout. They found 
that out as soon as they had pushed their way through 
the woods to the trout stream and had unpacked their 
fishing-rods. 

All afternoon the two men fished while Ted ran up and 
down along the stream. He climbed the slippery rocks 
to see where the sun looked down between the trees. He 
watched the clouds that went like flocks of sheep across 
the sky. But, chiefly, he gathered twigs and branches 
with which to build a fire to cook their supper. 

It was a good supper. There were sandwiches which 
Mother had packed that morning in a basket. There 
was also bacon that curled up like paper in the pan. And 
there was coffee, which Daddy would not let Ted taste. 
But first of all there had to be a fire. 

It took almost a whole afternoon to gather wood 
enough to build it. And then when Daddy had laid the 
sticks so carefully criss-cross it would not burn. 

“Humph,” said Uncle Bob, “it didn’t seem damp.” 

He struck a match and held it carefully in the hollow 
of his hand. A puff of wind came and blew it out. 

Now Uncle Bob had been a Boy Scout leader and 
had taught the boys how to start a fire with one match. 
So he was a little ashamed when he had to strike a second 
and finally a third match before the fire would burn. 

And all the while Ted was growing hungrier and hun¬ 
grier. Would supper never be ready? 


A DROP OF WATER 


3 


He looked back at the path through the woods by 
which they had come. He wondered how many miles it 
was to Nora and the gas stove. 

But at last the fire burned. And the bacon sizzled. 
And the coffee boiled. And they opened the basket of 
sandwiches. And then they had supper. 

After that it began to grow dark. And Ted crept 
closer to Daddy while Uncle Bob told him stories about 
the Indians who once lived in those woods. They built 
campfires too. Only they had no matches. In fact no¬ 
body had matches in those days. 

“But how could they build a fire without matches?” 
he asked. 

And then Uncle Bob told him how they rubbed two 
pieces of wood together until they burned. 

He told him other things too about the Indians; how 
the men went hunting and brought home game; how the 
women cooked the meat over the fire; how the little 
babies were wrapped up tight and strapped to their 
mother's backs or perhaps hung up in a tree to be out of 
the way. An Indian baby, it seemed, was called a pa¬ 
poose. 

And all the time Ted listened the woods were grow¬ 
ing darker. The campfire made a ring of light. But out¬ 
side of that ring was just blackness. He looked up to 
where the smoke was going. It was no longer blue up 
there and there were no clouds like flocks of sheep. It 


4 


A DROP OF WATER 


was grey between the tree-tops and one star looked down 
as if it were watching them. 

Ted shivered and crept still closer to Daddy. 

“Cold?” said Daddy, and put his arm across Ted’s 
shoulder. 

Ted shook his head. “No,” he answered. “That is, 
not much.” For he was afraid Daddy might take his 
arm away. He did not want that. But it would not do 
to say so. 

He thought about his little bed at home. About this 
time Mother usually read to him. Then she tucked him 
under the covers and put the light out. Mother must be 
lonely to-night. He was sorry for her, so sorry, in fact, 
that he began to have a queer feeling in his throat. This 
would not do. 

He winked his eyes rather fast and looked up at the 
sky. The star was still there watching them. Then he 
looked back toward the path through the woods. It 
was not there. There was nothing there but blackness. 

He had wondered in the afternoon how many miles it 
was back to Nora and the gas stove. That was because 
he was hungry. He was not hungry now. But he still 
had that queer feeling in his throat. It seemed, too, that 
there were things you could want worse than you wanted 
your supper. One of them was your mother. 

“I suppose,” he said, slowly, “we’re about one million 
miles from home.” 


A DROP OF WATER 


5 


“One million!” Uncle Bob shouted. “Bless the boy, 
he doesn’t know what a million means.” 

“Yes, I do,” said Ted. “It means all the miles there 
are, 

“Well,” said Uncle Bob, “that’s not so far wrong. Be¬ 
cause if you were to start out and walk straight ahead, 
you could walk all the way around the earth and back 
again without walking a million miles. In fact the only 
way you could go a million miles straight ahead would be 
to fly up into the sky.” 

“Yes, sir,” said Ted, politely. He was not listening 
very closely because there was such a rustling among 
the trees where the Indians were. And the star up above 
was winking at him. 

And then Daddy was wrapping him in one of Uncle 
Bob’s army blankets. At least that was what they said 
it was. But he knew better. And anyway it wasn’t him¬ 
self they were wrapping. It was that little Indian pa¬ 
poose and Mother was putting that little Indian papoose 
into his own bed at home. And then— 

And then it was morning. And the trees were green, 
not black. And the star was gone. And the sun was 
shining down between the tree-tops. And they had slept 
all night in the woods. 


CHAPTER II 


Ted was very busy one day in June. He was watch¬ 
ing the men put in coal. He liked to see them back the 
truck across the pavement, turn the handle which wound 
and wound until the body of the truck stood high up 
above the wheels, then, as it tipped over, help the coal to 
slide down the chute into the cellar. 

It was queer that coal would burn. It looked like 
stone. And stone would not burn. For the little girl 
next door had an oven built of stone and in it she baked 
mud pies. Sometimes he helped her. Not because he 
cared about mud pies, but because Mother said he ought 
to be polite. And besides she was such a very little girl. 
And he knew that the stones got very hot. But they 
would not burn. 

Coal, it seemed, was different. He had watched Daddy 
shoveling it into the furnace last winter, and he knew 
what a hot fire it made. He wondered where it came 
from. It came from somewhere on the cars for he had 
heard Daddy talk about a carload of coal. But where, 
he wondered. 

He asked Mother but she was busy beating eggs for 
the pudding she would not let Nora make. So she just 
said, “From the mines, dear.” And went on beating 
eggs. 

Now Ted wondered what “mines” meant. So that 
night he asked Daddy. And Daddy told him a long 


A DROP OF WATER 


7 


story. He could not remember it all but this much he 
did remember. 

A great many years ago the earth was covered with 
plants and tall grasses and trees. Perhaps the trees 
looked a little like those along the trout stream where 
they had fished. But they were much older. And there 
were no people living on the earth then. Not even In¬ 
dians. 

And after that the rivers spread out over the land in 
some places, and covered the plants and trees. And then 
the sand washed down by the rivers spread out, too, and 
left the plants and trees buried in the earth. Then they 
hardened into what we call coal. 

No one knew that the coal was there until many years 
later when men began to dig it out and use it to burn in¬ 
stead of wood. They were still digging it in what they 
called “mines.” 

This set Ted to thinking. You could light the gas 
stove and have a fire. You could gather wood and make 
a fire. Or you could heap up coal and keep a fire all 
winter in your furnace. And how glad you were to have 
a fire in winter. 

And yet when summer came you wanted no fire at 
all. Indeed if you went outdoors and stood there bare¬ 
headed you were glad to hurry back into the house to 
get cool. It was very funny. 


8 


A DROP OF WATER 


“Daddy,” said he, “wouldn’t it be fine if we could put 
the sunshine into a bottle in the summer when it’s too 
hot, and save it to use in the winter when it’s too cold? 
Then we wouldn’t need to buy coal.” 

“Wouldn’t it?” said Daddy. “In fact that is such a 
good idea that nature thought of it long before we did. 
Only we don’t always know where to look for the bot¬ 
tles.” 

Ted sat up very straight. “Do you know where to 
look for them, Daddy?” he cried. “Could I find any, do 
you think?” 

“You found a good many in the woods, didn’t you, 
the day we went fishing?” 

“In the woods? Bottles? Why no, Daddy, Truly I 
didn’t see a single one.” He wondered what Daddy 
could be thinking of. 

“Didn’t you help us make a fire?” 

“Yes, I gathered all the wood.” He was rather proud 
of this. 

“I picked up a lot of twigs and branches, but I didn’t 
see any bottles.” 

“The twigs and branches were the bottles—'bottles of 
sunshine.” 

Ted’s eye9 grew big. What could Daddy mean? 

“Listen, Ted. All the heat we have comes from the 
sun. The earth stores it up for us. The trees hold the 
sunshine and when we cut them down we can build a fire 



A DROP OF WATER 


9 


with them. Coal, which is made of buried trees, holds 
the sunshine and we make a fire of it. Gas, which we use 
in our gas stove, is just a part of the sunshine which 
the coal has stored up for us. All fire is bottled sun¬ 
shine. There is no heat which did not come at first 
from the sun. 

This seemed very strange to Ted. “Gee, it must be 
hot up there,” he said. “We wouldn’t want to go very 
close to it, would we, Daddy? How close to it could we 
get, do you think, if we could fly up into the sky?” 

“Well,” said Daddy, smiling, “the sun is more than 
ninety millions of miles away. So we wouldn’t run much 
risk of touching it if we did fly up into the sky.” 

“Ninety millions of miles!” said Ted. Ninety was nine 
times as many fingers as there are on both hands. He 
had learned that in school. And a million miles was all 
the miles there are. At least that is what he and Uncle 
Bob thought. And the sun was that far away. It seemed 
farther than anything could be. So he just stopped think¬ 
ing about it. 


CHAPTER III 


Daddy had gone to the office the next morning and 
Nora was hanging up tea-towels in the yard when 
Mother quickly set down the bowl of roses she had 
picked and hurried into the kitchen. There was a queer 
smell in the air and a crackling sound. 

“Nora,” she called, “your tea-kettle has boiled dry.” 

Nora came running from the yard. She picked up the 
kettle just as Mother turned out the gas. They both 
looked at it. It was not hurt. But it still crackled and 
there was still a queer smell about it. 

“Now think o’ that,” said Nora. “And me only gone 
a minute.” 

“What happened, Mother?” asked Ted. 

“The water boiled away.” 

“Away where?” 

“Why, away, dear. It just boiled away.” 

That was one queer thing about Mother. She never 
answered questions like Daddy. She just kept saying 
one thing over again. 

“Nora,” said Ted, when Mother had gone back to her 
roses, “where does water go to when it boils away?” 

“Sure, darlin’ an’ I don’t know. Into the air, I guess. 
Did you never see steam on the windys when I’d be doin’ 
a bit o’ washing?” 

“No,” said Ted. “What is steam?” 

“Och, darlin’, go ask yer Daddy. Nora’s busy.” 


A DROP OF WATER 


11 


Ted wanted to ask Daddy, but he had to wait until 
evening to do that. So instead he walked over to the 
stove again when Nora had left the room and began to 
watch the kettle. 

Nora had filled it with fresh water and set it once 
more over the fire. It made a rumbling sound inside. 
After awhile a little white cloud came out of the spout. 
This must be what Nora called steam. 

He took a holder and lifted the lid. There was no 
steam inside the kettle, just water boiling. And there was 
no steam in the room. Where had it come from ? 
Where did it go? 

He looked more closely. Just at the mouth of the 
spout was a clear space, before the white cloud began. 
There was no steam there. He wondered why. He put 
his finger into the clear space to find out how it felt. 

Then he must have screamed. For the next instant 
Nora came flying in from the yard and Mother from the 
living-room. 

“Bless the child,” cried Nora, “he’s burned himself.” 

And then Mother was holding him in her arms and 
Nora was hunting the baking-soda. When she found it 
they tied up his finger and it did not burn quite so much. 
But he did not go near the stove again. 

That night with a clean, white bandage on his finger, 
he sat on Daddy’s knee and told him about it. “But 
there wasn’t any steam,” he said, “where I put my fin- 
ger. 


12 


A DROP OF WATER 


Daddy smiled. “Not that you could see/’ he said. 
“Water is a queer thing. Sometimes we can see it. 
Sometimes we can’t. Steam is just water in one of its 
forms. There are other forms too. Some day you must 
learn about them.” 

“Tell me now,” he begged. “Tell me about steam, 
anyway.” 

“Well,” said Daddy, “when water boils it does not stay 
in the kettle. It boils away.” 

“That’s what Mother said. But where does it go?” 

“Into the air. That is why you saw a cloud near the 
spout of the kettle. But the cloud does not form at once. 
Just at the mouth of the spout is a clear space before 
the cloud forms. This clear space is pure steam or va¬ 
por. It is as hot as boiling water. You found that out 
when you put your finger there. But because it is pure 
steam we cannot see it. 

“When it reaches cooler air it is chilled and shrinks 
into a cloud. This floats in the dry air of the kitchen 
until it melts, just as sugar melts if you put it in water. 
When it melts we cannot see it. We call it gas or vapor. 
And because we cannot see it we say it is invisible.” 

“In-vis-i-ble,” repeated Ted. 

“Invisible?” said Uncle Bob, coming into the room at 
that moment. “What do you know about a big word like 
that ?” 

“I know what it means,” said Ted, proudly. “A thing 
is invisible when you cannot see it.” 



A DROP OF WATER 


13 


“Like what?” asked Daddy. “Tell Uncle Bob what 
happened to you this morning. ,, 

“I burned my finger in the steam from the tea-kettle. 
I couldn’t see it. But—but I could feel it. 

“I’ll bet you could,” said Uncle Bob. 

And just then dinner was ready and they all went out 
to the table. 


CHAPTER IV 


It was not until after dinner that Ted began thinking 
again about steam. Uncle Bob had dropped a pile of 
books upon the table when he came in. They had pic¬ 
tures in them. Ted thought they were queer pictures, 
as he turned the leaves. 

“What are they, Uncle Bob?” he asked. 

“Steam engines, old man.” 

“Steam engines?” 

“Yes. Didn’t you know that steam could drive an 
engine ?” 

“No,” said Ted. “What kind of engine?” 

“A good many kinds. Steam can pull a train of cars. 
Steam can run a factory.” 

“I don’t see how,” said Ted. He was thinking of 
Nora’s tea-kettle. It hadn’t seemed able to do anything 
except burn his fingers. 

“Well,” said Uncle Bob, “you find out how when you 
go to college and study these books. Some day I’ll take 
you to the engineering building and show you the big 

engines there. We have to learn how they are put to¬ 
gether.” 

“How big are they?” 

“Big enough, but not so big as the ones they really use 
—on steamships, for instance.” 

“How big are they?” 


A DROP OF WATER 


15 


Uncle Bob laughed, caught Ted round the waist and 
tossed him up to the ceiling, then set him down suddenly 
on a corner of the mantel. 

“Listen, old man,” he said. “Some day you and I 
will board an ocean liner and find out. Do you know 
they build ships as long as a city block, that can carry 
thousands of people?” 

“Gee,” said Ted, “I shouldn’t think there would be 
steam enough in all the world to run them.” 

“How much steam is there in all the world, Uncle 
Bob?” he asked, suddenly. 

Again Uncle Bob laughed. 

“Once upon a time,” he said, “the whole world was 
covered with steam.” 

“Covered with steam? How could people live with¬ 
out getting burned?” 

“There were no people.” 

“Not even Indians?” 

“Not even Indians.” 

“Then if there weren’t any people, how does anybody 
know anything about it?” 

Uncle Bob set Ted down suddenly on the floor. He 
laughed more than ever. 

“My child,” he said, “you will be a joy to your teachers 
as you grow up.” 

Then, “Listen, Ted. This earth we live on was once 
a part of the sun.” 


2 


A DROP OF WATER 


16 


Ted thought that was a mistake. ‘T don’t see,” he said, 
“how it could get up there.” 

“It didn’t get up there. It was there. It came from 
there.” 

Ted still looked doubtful. 

“Do you remember,” said Uncle Bob, “when you and 
Mother were making candy the other day, how Mother 
took the spoon out and twirled it so fast that some of 
the candy flew off and stuck fast to the stove? 

“Well, that is what happened to the sun. It was whirl¬ 
ing so fast that a piece of it flew off and became the 
earth. And because the sun was very hot, the earth was 
very hot too. And because the sun was whirling so fast, 
the earth kept on whirling too.” 

“Couldn’t it stop ?” 

“No, it hasn’t stopped yet. And because it was so hot 
there could be no water on it, only steam. It was covered 
with steam which rose in thick clouds. When the clouds 
reached the cooler air above they turned into water which 
fell again. 

“The earth gradually cooled off, however, by its con¬ 
stant turning, just as your spoonful of candy cooled when 
you waved it in the air. And so the steam, or vapor, 
hanging over it was also cooled until it became water and 
covered the earth like a great sea. 

“As long as the earth was still hot, though, this water 
again boiled and again rose and fell in a great shower of 


A DROP OF WATER 


17 


rain. Thus rising and falling by turns, it filled the cracks 
and low places in the earth’s crust, and formed rivers and 
lakes.” 

“Gee, Uncle Bob, that must have been some rain. How 
long did it last?” 

“Nobody knows. But it must have been many thou¬ 
sands of years. And even when the earth was cool and 
the streams could flow, this rising and falling of the 
water did not stop.” 

“Why not?” 

“Because the heat of the sun still kept changing water 
into vapor.” 

“How long did it do that?” 

“Always. It is still doing it. Water still rises and 
becomes vapor. Then reaching cooler air it falls as rain.” 

“Now ?” 

“Right now.” 

“But I never saw it.” 

“Of course not. Didn’t you tell me that vapor was—?” 

“Invisible,” shouted Ted. 

“And that means ?” 

“We cannot see it.” 

“But you can see it sometimes, Ted. Some of it does 
not fall at once but stays in the air as clouds. And some¬ 
times these clouds, pushed by the wind, touch the tops of 
mountains and there form dew or fog or snow.” 

“But snow isn’t water.” 


i8 


A DROP OF WATER 


“It certainly is. And so is ice.” 

Ted took a minute to think about this. He knew that 
ice melted very fast if you held it in your hand. And 
then it was water, to be sure. 

“Ice is water in a solid form. Water is water in a 
liquid form. Steam is water in the form of gas or va¬ 
por. Can you remember that? Solid, liquid, gas or va¬ 
por.” 

“Solid, liquid, gas or vapor,” repeated Ted. It was 
as hard to remember as “invisible.” 

“Tell me some more about water,” he begged. 

“Water?” Uncle Bob rose from his chair, tucked 
two fingers between the buttons of his vest and puffed 
up his chest the way the dean of the college always did 
when he was going to make a speech. 

Ted laughed. He knew Uncle Bob was going to be 
funny. 

“Water,” said Uncle Bob, “is the most useful thing 
we have. Wherever and in whatever form it reaches 
the earth, the earth welcomes it. It drinks it in. It 
holds it like a sponge. And so the hidden places are 
filled with it. It bubbles up as springs in the mountain. 
It flows through ravines in streams. These streams join 
each other and form rivers, which flow on to the sea. 

“These rivers carry sand and earth along with them 
and thus build up new ground. They are always busy 
tearing down or building up and bringing life to plants 
and animals. 


A DROP OF WATER 


*9 


“When they reach the ocean they are lost in its depths. 
But not for long. For nothing in nature is ever lost. The 
sun shining on the sea soon drinks up these drops of 
water again, and again scatters them over the earth. So 
that the ocean constantly receives water flowing into it 
from the land, and as constantly gives it back again into 
the air. This goes on without stopping and will go on 
forever. 

“Nothing that we see or touch is ever destroyed. It 
may change its form; it may be separated into its parts; 
but it is still there. A plant in the autumn is killed by 
the frost; its leaves dry up and fall upon the ground. 
But the ground is so much the richer. And in springtime 
it will give back more beautiful flowers. A tree is cut 
down and burned, but the smoke of it rises into the sky. 
Just so all the water in the plant and in the tree is saved 
and goes up to mingle with the clouds. 

“Go out into the garden some June morning and see 
the dew sparkling drop by drop on the roses. Those 
same drops may have formed the snow crunching under 
the tread of the Polar bear, or have slaked the thirst of 
a tiger on the burning sands of Africa. They may have 
furnished drink for the first living man; they may fur¬ 
nish drink again for our great-great-grandchildren. We 
may even meet them again ourselves in the ice over which 
we skate in December. 

“Water is one of the commonest things we know. It 
is everywhere. We could not do without it. It causes 


20 


A DROP OF WATER 


the earth to be fruitful and give us food. It gives mois¬ 
ture to the air, without which we could not breathe. It 
is a part of all animals, all vegetables, and is even found 
in minerals. It flows across the earth finding its way into 
everything. 

“It is our most wholesome drink. Indeed it is the 
chief part of everything we drink. We sail our boats on 
it. By it all parts of the country are brought together. 

“It is the willing slave of man. In the form of steam, 
it gives us power. We use it to run our factories, to 
drive our trains. Thus it helps to give us all we have 
to eat or wear. It takes us everywhere. It helps to make 
of all the world one great family. 

“Thus as solid, liquid, or gas, it is our greatest friend. 
Let us go on then and find out what water is, what it 
is made of, and what it can do for us?” 

“Do you mean that, Uncle Bob?” 

“Mean what?” 

“Will you really tell me all about water some day?” 

“Some day, perhaps.” 


CHAPTER V 


The little girl next door had set three of her dolls in 
a row along the hedge. It was a low hedge between the 
two yards. Ted could talk to the little girl over it. He 
wondered what the dolls were doing there. He took no 
interest in dolls but still he wondered. 

He walked along the hedge until he came to the open¬ 
ing just where the hollyhocks began. There was not 
supposed to be an opening there. But that was where 
he always went when he had something to show to the 
little girl. And when you push very close to a hedge 
a good many times, and some one in a pink bonnet pushes 
very close to you on the other side, to see what you have 
to show, there soon comes to be an opening which is 
nobody’s fault. 

Ted walked to this opening and stepped through to see 
what the dolls were doing. He found out. They were 
having a party. There was a table in front of them with 
a white cloth on it. And there was toy dishes and a 
vase of flowers in the middle, just as Mother always put 
flowers on the table. 

And the little girl was coming from the house with 
something in her hand. She wore a pink bonnet as usual 
and also a pink dress. But it was a round kind of dress 
that stood out away from her and it had ruffles. It was 
not at all like the rompers she usually wore when she 
played in the yard. 


22 


A DROP OF WATER 


There was something queer about her eyes too. It 
looked as if she had tears on the ends of her eyelashes. 
And she talked in jerks. 

“Mother—went away,” she said. “She dressed me— 
before—she went. So I could—go driving—with Daddy 
—after lunch.” 

“That’s nice,” said Ted. 

“And she said—I could have—a party—but Jane— 

won’t let me—have anything to eat.” Her voice went up 

\ 

in the air all of a sudden—something like the way a 
cat sounds when you step on its tail. 

Ted jumped. “Don’t,” he cried. “Don’t do that.” 

It made him feel like hitting something. Anyway it 
was silly to cry. 

“You don’t have to have things to eat to have a party,” 
he told her. 

“Yes, you do,” she said, looking at him with very wet 
eyes. 

“Not real things, I mean.” 

“But I want real things.” 

“Make-believe things are just as good,” he said. 

She still looked at him. 

“Make-believe things are even better,” he went on, get¬ 
ting more and more in earnest. They never give you 
the—the stomach-ache.” 

“Come on,” he said, “let’s get some sand—and water 
—and build a fire—and make some mud pies.” 


A DROP OF WATER 


23 


“Will you?” she said and began jumping up and down. 

“Sure.” And they went to work in a great hurry. 

They piled up sand and brought water from the house 
in a tin-cup. Then they gathered some twigs from the 
dead branches underneath the apple-tree. Paper they 
got from the back porch, where Jane had laid a pile of 
newspapers. 

They still needed matches. They watched their chance 
to get these. For they would not ask Jane for a thing. 
Not after she had said they could not have real things 
to eat. 

It was some time before they could get to the matches, 
for Jane was scraping potatoes in the kitchen. After a 
while, however, she came into the yard and began talk¬ 
ing to Nora across the hedge. 

Nora had just come out of the house with a pail of 
water and a broom. She was going to scrub the walk. It 
was a good time to get the matches while Nora and Jane 
were talking. 

The little girl jumped up and down as the paper began 
to burn. At first the fire curled slowly around the edges, 
then suddently it shot up into the air. The next minute 
the pink dress that stood out all around was blazing too, 
and the little girl screamed and began to run. 

“Howly mother!” screamed Jane, as the child ran to¬ 
wards her. The next minute Nora was over the hedge 
with her pail of water. She emptied it in one breath over 
the pink dress. 


24 


A DROP OF WATER 


The little girl stood gasping and shivering from her 
cold bath. But the fire was out. 

After that Jane went to the telephone, and soon the 
doctor was there and the little girl’s Daddy. Her mother 
came much later because she had to come on the train. 

By the time she got there, the little girl was feeling 
quite comfortable and the doctor said her burns would 
soon be well. But she looked so funny when they carried 
her out on the porch, with her fat little legs all tied up 
in something white. 

By the next day she grew tired of sitting on her own 
porch and she could not run and play. So Ted begged 
her mother to let her come over to their porch for a 
change. 

Soon after they had carried her over and placed her 
in a comfortable chair, her father and Ted’s father came 
home on the same car and were very much surprised to 
find her there. 

“Tell us a story, Daddy,” teased Ted, for he too found 
it hard to sit still on the porch when he wanted to run 
and play. 

“Well,” said Daddy, “a great many years ago there 
were people living on the earth called Greeks. 

“I know one,” said the little girl. “Daddy goes to 
his place sometimes for lunch. I went with him once.” 

“Well, yes,” said Daddy, “I know him too. But these 
people were a little different. We call them ancient 
Greeks. 


A DROP OF WATER 


25 


“And they thought a great deal about a great many 
things. And they believed that there was just four things 
from which everything else came, earth, air, fire, and 
water. And they thought that fire and water were as 
different as could be, because they could use water to 
put out fire.” 

“Just like Nora put out me,” said the little girl. 

“Exactly,” said Daddy. 

“But after a long while, people found out that water 
was not so different from fire after all. That was after 
they learned to divide it into its parts.” 

“Its parts?” said Ted. 

“Yes,” said Daddy. “When you go to college you will 
learn how to divide water into two parts. One part 
will burn. The other part helps other things to burn. 
We use some of it to light our cities. Some of it we 
breathe in the air.” 

Ted looked very doubtful. “We can’t breath water,” 
he said. 

“No, and we can’t burn water. Not until we divide 
it into the two parts, or gases, of which it is made.” 

“What are their names?” asked Ted. 

“You couldn’t remember if I told you.” 

“Yes, I could. Anyway, I could try.” 

Daddy smiled. “Oxygen,” he said. 

“Ox-y-gen,” repeated Ted. 


26 


A DROP OF WATER 


“And hydrogen.” 

“Hy-dro-gen.” 

“And part of it will burn.” 

“Isn’t that funny?” said Ted, turning to the little girl. 
“Would you think water could burn?” 

But there was no answer, the little girl had gone to 

sleep. 


CHAPTER VI 


Ted had a cup of water which he poured slowly to 
the ground. The dolls were having their first party since 
the little girl next door had gotten over her burns. But 
there was no fire and no mud pies. Ted had stepped 
through the opening in the hedge to see. 

There were real things, though, to eat, cookies and a 
pitcher of milk. The little girl’s mother had said “no 
milk” at first. And then afterward she remembered an 
extra bottle on the ice and sent Jane down to the party 
under the apple tree with the pitcher. That was why 
Ted, who had been invited to the party, was pouring 
the water out of his cup. 

It was a silver cup with letters marked on it, a very 
pretty cup, in fact, but it was not the cup he was look¬ 
ing at so closely. It was the drops of water falling 
from it to the ground. Why were they round, he won¬ 
dered. 

If he poured the water a little faster it fell in a stream, 
but the stream was round too. If he stood up on a 
chair it fell first in a stream, then in drops. It struck 
the earth with a thud too, as if it fell faster the farther 
it went. 

“Well, little Sir Isaac,” said a voice near by, “study¬ 
ing the force of gravity?” 

It was Daddy, home early from the office. 

“Gravity?” said Ted. “What is gravity?” 


28 


A DROP OP WATER 


“That is what Sir Isaac wondered too,” said Daddy. 

“And who was Sir Isaac?” Ted went on. 

The little girl looked up gravely from her dolls. Ted’s 
Daddy had seated himself in one of the small chairs with 
his long legs stuck out in front of him. It was such a 
little chair for such a big man. But Ted’s Daddy seemed 
to be thinking about nothing but Sir Isaac. 

“Sir Isaac Newton,” he said, “lived a good many years 
ago. He watched the things that went on around him and 
wondered about them.” 

“He noticed that water fell in drops that were almost 
round. That they were about the shape of apples, in 
fact, a little flat on the top and on the bottom. And 
that they fell faster the nearer they got to the ground. 

“One day he was lying under an apple tree and saw 
an apple drop. He wondered what made it drop. He 
went on wondering for a long time. At last he thought 
he had found out. 

“ ‘Ha,’ he said, ‘I think the earth must pull the apple 
down, but if that is so, then the apple must pull the 
earth up. Of course, it can’t pull the earth very far 
because the earth is so much bigger than the apple.’ 

“This was found to be so. Sir Isaac said the earth 
attracts the apple and the apple attracts the earth, so 
they come together. But the apple is small and it moves 
so much farther than the earth, that the earth does not 
seem to move at all. 


A DROP OF WATER 


29 


“Now if you hang an apple on a string it stays there 
all the time and the string is quite straight. I suppose 
it must be pulling on that string all the time, and trying 
to get to the earth. If you don’t think so cut the string 
with a pair of scissors and see. This funny thing that 
makes the apple fall, Sir Isaac called gravity.” 

Daddy got up after that and stretched his long legs. 
And the little girl felt relieved about the chair. The 
door clicked behind him as he went into the house. 

Just after that there came another sound that made 
both Ted and the little girl look up into the sky. It was 
a distant rumble. And the sky was growing dark. 

They began to gather up the toy dishes and the dolls. 
But before they could finish, a big drop of rain fell plump 
on the little girl’s nose. Ted laughed to see how sur¬ 
prised she looked. 

Then more drops fell, on their heads and hands and 
all around them. They ran for the porch. By the time 
they reached it, a million such drops were falling all 
around them. 

They fell in streams, in bucketsfull, it seemed to Ted. 
They stood on the porch and watched them. Then the 
rain began to drive in and they went into the house. 

Against the window pane it came dashing. It seemed 
determined to get in. Since it could not get in, it ran 
down in little streams, which joined each other and be¬ 
came big streams. 


30 


A DROP OF WATER 


They wondered at the force of it outside. Where it 
struck the ground it made holes. It dashed so hard it 
bounced and threw mud against the porch steps. They 
laughed as they watched it. But Ted was thinking too. 

“Where does it all come from?” asked the little girl, 
clapping her hands. 

“Out of the sky,” said Ted, still thinking. 

When he first poured the water out of his cup slowly, 
it fell in drops that hardly disturbed the dust. When 
he stood up in a chair it fell harder. But it would take 
a very high chair indeed to make it fall as hard as this. 

He looked up into the sky. He could not see the sky. 
He could only see rain. It was a very big cupful of 
water that was falling now. One could not see to the 
edge of it. 

Yet it seemed to be the same thing. Water falling 
from a height. His cupful of water was a small shower. 
This drenching rain was a big cupful of water. And 
it fell faster and harder the farther it came. 

He had watched rain before. Sometimes it came 
slowly and gently. You hardly knew when it began. 
That kind of rain fell on a gray day when it was cloudy 
all around. 

But to-day had been a clear day or there would have 
been no party for the dolls. The rain had come sud¬ 
denly. It must have come from very far up in the sky, 
where they could not see it coming. It must be because 
it came so far that it fell so hard. 


A DROP OF WATER 


31 


The next minute something rattled against the window 
pane that was not rain. It sounded like pebbles. It 
looked like pebbles, too, as it lay scattered on the win¬ 
dow sill. 

Ted opened the window just a little and gathered some 
of it in. It melted in his hand. This was very strange. 

It seemed to be ice, just like the ice in the ice-box, 
only not the same shape. For when Nora took the ice¬ 
pick and broke that, it flew into splinters. This was not 
splintered ice but round ice. 

It was round like pebbles, or apples, or—could it be— 
raindrops? He almost jumped. Maybe it was. Maybe 
it was frozen raindrops. He must ask Daddy. 

He did not have long to wait. For the rain had stop¬ 
ped dashing now, and Daddy had stepped over the rail¬ 
ing between the two porches and had come to take him 
home. 

“Daddy,” he cried, “look, look,” and showed him the 
pebbles on the window sill. 

“Yes, I see,” said Daddy. “Hail, isn’t it. I heard it 
too.” 

“Hail ?” said Ted. “What is hail ?” 

“Frozen raindrops.” 

Ted fairly danced. He had guessed right. 

“But what made them freeze?” 

“A cold wind. You know the higher up you go in 
the air, the colder it gets. And sometimes just when 


3 


32 


A DROP OF WATER 


the raindrops are falling a specially cold wind cuts across 
and freezes them right where they are. Then they fall 
as ice pebbles instead of raindrops. And we call these 
ice pebbles hail. ,, 

“Oh, look/’ cried the little girl. “The sun is coming 
out.” And surely enough it was. 

The drops on the window panes still joined together 
and formed streams. The streams still ran along the 
sills and dropped to the ground. There were deep pud¬ 
dles of water on the walk where the rain had dashed. 

But the sun had come out and was making diamonds 
of the drops and gold of the pools of water. And out 
under the apple tree where the party had been it was 
wet but shining. 

“Why did it have to rain?” pouted the little girl. 

Ted shook his head. 

“I don’t see where rain comes from anyway,” she 
went on. 

“From the sky,” repeated Ted. 

“Oh, of course I know that,” she cried. “You said 
that before. But what made it come down on our heads ?” 

“Gravity,” said Ted. 


CHAPTER VII 


It was a bright summer morning. Uncle Bob strolled 
into the dining-room humming a tune. Daddy had gone 
to the office and Ted was just finishing his breakfast. 

Nora brought a pitcher of milk from the ice and set 
it on the table for Uncle Bob’s cereal. It was a silver 
pitcher, almost as bright as the sunshine itself. Ted 
could see his face in it—a funny puffed out face where 
the pitcher was rounded—as he sat across the table from 
Uncle Bob. 

A few minutes later he looked at the pitcher again. 
He could not see his face at all now. The pitcher was 
covered all over with a mist. He wondered why. 

He reached across and ran his finger over its smooth 
side. It was cold and wet. There was water on his fin¬ 
ger which he had brushed off the pitcher. He could not 
understand it. Surely the pitcher did not leak. If it 
had, it would have leaked milk and not water. 

He looked at Uncle Bob, who was eating his break¬ 
fast as if he had no thought of anything else in the world. 
In reality Uncle Bob was thinking very hard about a 
trip he was going to take later in the summer. So when 
Ted said, “What makes the pitcher wet?” he answered 
“The—er—what ?” 

“The pitcher.” 

“The pitcher—what?” 

“What makes the pitcher wet?” repeated Ted. 


34 


A DROP OF WATER 


“Oh,” said Uncle Bob, as if he had just waked up, 
“cold things always sweat in hot weather. It’s—er— 
condensation, you know.” Which meant nothing at all 
to Ted. So he climbed down from the table and started 
for the door. 

“People don’t sweat when they’re cold,” he said. 
“They sweat when they’re hot. 

At that Uncle Bob laughed and his mind came all the 
way back from that camp where he was going next 
month. 

“Listen, youngster,” he said, “we’ll go outdoors and 
talk it over.” 

He swung Ted up to his shoulder, ran with him 
down the steps from the porch, then set him down sud¬ 
denly on the gravel walk. 

“Don’t go on the grass, dear,” called a voice from 
above.. It was Mother shaking something out of an up¬ 
stairs window. 

They both looked up. 

“Keep on the walk, both of you,” she repeated. “The 
grass is wet.” 

Uncle Bob shouted. He was Mother’s youngest 
brother, and he always said she treated him as if he were 
just Ted’s age. 

“All right, sister,” he agreed. “We’ll sit here on the 
lowest step like the pair of good children that we are, 
and keep our precious feet on the walk. Will that do?” 

“Yes,” she laughed. “That will do.” 


A DROP OF WATER 


35 


“Why is the grass wet?” asked Ted. It didn’t rain 
last night, did it?” 

“Dew,” said Uncle Bob. 

“Dew?” repeated Ted. “What is that?” 

“Dew is what you saw on the milk pitcher.” 

Ted looked doubtful. There was a twinkle in Uncle 
Bob’s eye just as there always was when he was teasing 
someone. 

“No, it isn’t,” said Ted. “That wasn’t dew. You said 
it was con-con—” 

“Condensation,” said Uncle Bob. ’’Well, so is dew.” 

“Listen, child,” he said, “and I’ll tell you about it. 
What became of the water that boiled out of the tea 
kettle the day you burned your finger?” 

“It went into the air.” 

“Do you suppose it stayed there?” 

Ted did not know. 

“Well, some of it did. There is always water in the 
air we breathe. We could not live without it. 

“The first animals that ever lived, lived in water. And 
we are all of us water animals, more or less, still. Our 
bodies are largely made of it. We have bones to give 
us shape, but three-fourths of the body is water. So we 
must both drink water and breathe water to keep well. 

“This water forms our blood and flows through every 
part of us. It washes us out, as it were, because when 
we are through with it we breathe it out again. Hold 


36 


A DROP OF WATER 


a mirror before your face some frosty morning and 
watch the mist gather on it just as it gathered on the 
pitcher at the breakfast table. That is water that we 
are done with, so we breathe it out into the air again. 

“We also throw it off from our skin. We see it stand 
in drops of sweat on our faces. As you said just now, 
people sweat when they are hot. And that is a good thing, 
because the sweating cools us off. We could not stand 
warm weather without it. 

“We also like to drink a great deal of water when we 
are warm. It helps too to cool us off. And the air is 
something like ourselves. The hotter it is the more water 
it can drink. But when it cools off it breathes out the 
water again in a mist such as you saw on the pitcher. 
When this happens we say it condenses. Can you remem¬ 
ber that ?” 

“Condenses/’ said Ted. 

“What does water do when it goes up in the air?” 

Ted shook his head. 

“E-vap-” prompted Uncle Bob. 

“Evaporates,” shouted Ted. 

“What does it do when it forms again in drops out 
of the air?” 

“Condenses.” 

“Right-o,” said Uncle Bob. 

“And when does water evaporate?” he went on. 

“When—when—it is hot,” said Ted. 


A DROP OP WATER 


37 


“Yes. And when does it condense?” 

“When it is cold.” And then Ted turned a hand¬ 
spring on the gravel walk. He was so proud of what he 
had learned. 

The gravel walk was hot to the touch. The sun was 
now beating down on it. But the grass beside it was 
wet and cool. Ted wondered why. 

You haven’t told me yet,” he said, “why the grass is 
wet.” 

“Yes, I have,” teased Uncle Bob. “It is wet with 
dew.” 

“But the walk isn’t wet. Why not?” 

“Lesson number two,” said Uncle Bob. He stretched 
up his arms and pretended to be very tired. 

Then he said, “Would you like to see something 
through the microscope?” 

Ted jumped to his feet. Microscope was a big word 
but he knew what it meant. It was the name of some¬ 
thing Uncle Bob had brought home from his study 
room at college when the term ended. It was a wonder¬ 
ful glass. Anything you put under it grew so big that 
you could see everything about it plainly. You could 
even see things in it that you never knew were there. 
Your own thumb-nail was as full of ridges as a plowed 
field. He ran to get the glass. 


/ 


CHAPTER VIII 


Uncle Bob was looking closely at something near the 
gate when Ted came back with the microscope. It was 
a spider’s web, beautifully formed and sparkling with 
dew. He lifted it carefully. As it came free they saw 
that the grass beneath it was dry. Ted wondered why. 

Then Uncle Bob told him. 

“If you throw a pebble in the water,” he said, “you 
see waves moving away from where the pebble fell.” 

Ted nodded. He had often seen them. 

“Well just so there are waves in the air. We call them 
heat waves. They come down from the sun. And so 
during the day, when the sun shines the earth stores up 
heat. But at night when the sun has gone down, these 
heat waves go up again. They are always moving one 
way or the other. 

“Now if there were nothing between us and the sun, 
the earth would get so hot during the day that we could 
not walk on it. And so cold at night that the plants 
would freeze and die. But fortunately we have the air 
between us and the sun. And the air is partly made 
up of water in the form of vapor. This vapor acts like 
a tent over us. It catches some of the heat waves as 
they come down and keeps the earth from getting too 
hot. It also catches some of them as they go up from 
the earth at night and keeps it from getting too cold. 


A DROP OF WATER 


39 


“It is because of this vapor tent that we have dew. 
The grass blades, being very thin, lose their heat faster 
than they can draw it out of the earth. So they become 
cold. And the vapor just above them is chilled by touch¬ 
ing them. Being chilled, it forms in drops of water on 
the leaves. 

“The cold pitcher on the breakfast table and the cold 
leaves of a summer night do the same thing. They chill 
the vapor in the air into a mist of fine water drops. 

“But suppose you spread something over the grass, 
your handkerchief, perhaps. There will be no dew on 
the grass under that even though there is dew all around. 
Why? 

“Because that thin piece of muslin stops the heat waves 
as they rise and keeps the grass from getting cold enough 
to draw the water out of the air. 

“The spider’s web we lifted did the same thing. You 
saw plenty of dew-drops on the web but none on the 
grass beneath. For even a spider’s web is strong enough 
to shut in the heat waves and keep the grass blades 
warm.” 

“But Uncle Bob, why isn’t there dew on the gravel 
walk? Nobody spread a handkerchief on that.” 

“The gravel walk is very different from a blade of 
grass. Gravel can draw up heat from the earth as fast as 
it gives it out, so it never gets cold enough to draw water 
out of the air. That is one of the ways in which na- 


40 


A DROP OP WATER 


ture takes care of things. The grass, which needs water, 
can draw it out of the air. The gravel walk, which does 
not need water, cannot draw it out. 

“There is another trick which nature has. On a cloudy 
night, when there is a chance of rain, there is little or no 
dew even on the grass. This is because the clouds keep 
down the heat waves so that the grass does not become 
cold enough to form dew. 

“But after a hot dry day, when the plants are thirsty 
and there is small hope of rain, they have the best pos¬ 
sible chance of drinking the dew from the air. 

“In some hot countries there is rain only at certain 
times in the year. All the rest of the year the skies are 
cloudless and the rain never falls. If it were not for 
dew, every green thing would dry up and die. But be¬ 
cause the air is so hot and dry and there are no clouds, 
the dew forms thickly enough to take the place of rain. 
In this way nature takes care of all plant life. 

Only on the deserts covered with sand there is no dew. 
For sand is like our gravel walk, only finer. And every¬ 
where the air touches it, it heats the air and makes the 
water rise again instead of condensing in the form of 
dew. 

“Now, then,” finished Uncle Bob, “suppose we take the 
microscope and see what we can find.” 

They had a wonderful walk that morning. They went 
down the lane that led away from the street. And there 
were all kinds of weeds growing. They looked at many 


A DROP OF WATER 


41 


of them under the microscope. They learned much about 
dewdrops and the way they cling to different stems and 
leaves. 

They found first of all that a dewdrop is like a mir¬ 
ror. Just as Ted had seen his face—all puffed out— 
in the rounded side of the silver pitcher, so one could 
see a cloud in the sky—upside down in a dewdrop. 




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9 . 


Spider’s Web Magnified 

Then they looked at a spider’s web. For some strange 
reason, no one knows why, the dew had gathered only 
on the cross-wise threads, not on the up-and-down ones. 
And every drop was the same size, so that each thread 
looked like a string of pearls, as even as the pearl neck¬ 
lace in Mother’s jewel-box. 


42 


A DROP OF WATER 




Caterpillar 


A caterpillar, who must have slept out all night, had a 
regular shower bath of dew on his furry back. 

Among plants, a mullein leaf, which was almost as 
furry as the caterpillar, held a number of large drops. 

Sharp-pointed gras¬ 
ses had their dew- 
drops collected in a 
row along one or both 
edges. On the top 
would be a large drop, 
along the edges a 
regular row of little 
ones like beads. When 

the large diop was Mullein Eeaf with Dew Drop Magnified 























A DROP OF WATER 


43 


ready to fall it would roll along the edge, gathering all 
the little drops as it went until it fell in one heavy drop 
into the earth to water the roots of the plant. 

Leaves too gathered dew, not only on the flat part 
but on the edge too. And as all leaves were not the same 
shape, there was difference in the way the dew formed. 



Strawberry Reaves with Dew Drops 

A strawberry leaf, sharp-pointed around the edges, 
had dew not only on its flat part. It had also a big dew- 
drop in each nick around the edge. 

The stems of many plants were hairy or furry like the 
mullein leaf. They also had dewdrops all the way down. 

One thing Ted noticed was that even the weeds with 
their tiny flowers smelled sweet when they brushed past 


















44 


A DROP OF WATER 


them. Uncle Bob said the dew did this too. That all 
flowers were sweeter with the dew on them. 

When they got home Nora was on the back porch 
freezing ice cream for dinner. Ted had so much to 
tell her about the dewdrops that he almost forgot to 
notice what she was doing. 

Then he said, “Oh, goody, goody, ice-cream.” 

And then he stopped short and looked at the freezer. 
There was frost on it, regular frost like the kind you 
could see in winter on the window panes. 

“Uncle Bob,” he cried, “what makes frost on the 
freezer?” 

Uncle Bob dropped down on the porch and clapped 
both hands over his ears. He pretended to be deaf. You 
see he wanted to go on thinking about that camping trip. 

“What makes questions on a little boy’s tongue?” he 
said. 

“Well, but Uncle Bob, what does make frost in the 
summertime?” 

“The same thing that makes dew.” 

Ted looked blank. 

“What did I tell you? Con-den-” 

“Condensation,” shouted Ted. 

“Right-o,” said Uncle Bob. 

“But why does it make frost instead of dew?” 

Uncle Bob sat up straight. He took out the two fin¬ 
gers he had stuffed into his ears. 


A DROP OF WATER 


45 


“Well, child,” he said, “water can be very hot or very 
cold. Or it can be anywhere in between. Now when 
the air with water in it cools down to a certain point, 
it forms dew. So we call this point the dew point. But 
if it gets still lower it forms not dew but frost. For 
frost is frozen dew. 

“Now the ice and salt that Nora is using to freeze the 
ice-cream make the air around the freezer very cold, so 
that it condenses into frost and not dew. It is the same 
kind of frost you will see next October on the garden. 
Remind me of it then and I will tell you about frost 
crystals. ,, 

“But Uncle Bob—” 

“Not another word, old man. Next October, I said, 
not now.” 

“But—” 

“October, I said.” And Uncle Bob went into the 
house singing, “When the frost is on the pumpkin and—” 

The door banged and Ted could hear nothing more. 


CHAPTER IX 


“I can see a bear—and a mountain—and an awful big- 
giant,” said Ted gazing up into the sky. 

“Now the moutain is melting. And the bear is all 
gone. No. he’s turned into a horse. And the giant—oh r 
look, the giant’s reaching down. See him there?” 

“No,” said the little girl. “It just looks like white- 
of-egg to me, when Jane beats it up for a pudding.” 

Ted looked disgusted. There were so many things the 
little girl could not see. And why was she forever fool¬ 
ing with that doll ? 

He blinked as he looked at the green trees around 
them. They were restful to look at after the sky. 

When he looked up again the giant had melted into 
little flecks of foam under the horse—or was it a camel? 
That was the worst of it. P was forever changing into 
something else while you looked. 

Perhaps it did look like white-of-egg after all, only a 
wonderful kind of white-of-egg, tinged at the edges with 
pink and silver and gold. And beaten in a big blue bowl 
that fitted right down over the earth. 

“Or soapsuds,” the little girl said next. 

“Gee,” said Ted, “if we could bring it down here, 
couldn’t we blow a lot of bubbles?” 

Somebody up in the sky seemed to be blowing soap 
bubbles now. Ted could see them—floating, floating. 
That was one strange thing about clouds. They not only 


A DROP OP WATER 


47 


changed their shape, but they always kept moving. Ted 
wondered why. 

In fact he had often looked at the clouds and won¬ 
dered at them. They looked so different at different 
times of day. In the morning they lay like straight 
bands across the sky. Sometimes the bands were not 
straight but curly. And now in the middle of the after¬ 
noon they were piled in heaps. You felt as if you could 
reach up, with a long enough spoon, and scrape off one 
cloud from another behind it. And then there was a 
very thick black cloud that came just before a shower. 

It was not very long before he saw just such a dark 
cloud gathering. The clouds that looked like white-of- 
egg or soapsuds thinned out and floated off faster than 
before. And the dark cloud seemed to be chasing them. 
But it did not chase them very far. For after a few 
drops of rain, which drove the children into the house, 
the sun came out again. 

It shone right down between the clouds. Indeed it 
shone down even while the rain was falling. And then 
a wonderful thing happened. Right around the blue 
bowl, where it fitted down into the tree-tops, was a beau¬ 
tiful band of color, red and blue and green, all shading 
into each other. The children danced for joy. “A rain¬ 
bow,” shouted Ted. “A rainbow !” 

And just then Daddy came home and they showed it 
to him. 


4 


48 


A DROP OF WATER 


“What makes a rainbow?” asked Ted. 

“And aren’t clouds made of white-of-egg?” said the 
little girl. 

“My, my,” said Daddy. “One at a time, please.” 

And then he got a book with pictures in it and began 
to tell them about the clouds. 

“What makes a cloud?” he asked first of all. 

No one answered. 

“You know, Ted,” he said. What happened when 
the water boiled out of the kettle?” 

“It—it made a cloud,” answered Ted. 

“Precisely. And what happened in the kitchen, hap¬ 
pens outdoors and everywhere. 

“There is always vapor—that is water—in the air. Be¬ 
cause when the heat of the sun meets water anywhere, 
it changes it into invisible vapor. This vapor rises ra¬ 
pidly into the sky. 

“Now hot air can hold more water than cold air. But 
fortunately no kind of air can keep right on taking up 
water without stopping. If it could it would get so full 
of water that we could not breathe it. 

“So when the air which has taken up all the water 
it can hold rises into the sky it becomes chilled and con¬ 
denses into clouds. The reason we can see them so 
plainly is because there is such a large mass of air chilled 
at one time. When a large mass of air is chilled near 
the earth it forms mist or fog. 


A DROP OF WATER 


49 


“A mist or fog does not seem to move, but the clouds 
do. This is because they are blown along by winds which 
we may not feel here below/’ 

Then he began to show them the pictures in the book. 
“Here are four kinds of clouds,” he said. 

Ted looked at them closely. There were the straight 
clouds, the curly clouds, the white-of-egg clouds, and 
the rain clouds. 


Then Daddy told them their names. The straight 
clouds, it seemed, were called stratus. 

“Stratus,” said Daddy, “means ‘layer.’ And we call 
them stratus because they come in ‘layers’ or bands. 
They are caused by 
the settling of other 
clouds. For this rea¬ 
son we often see them 
in the early morning 
or in the evening, 
when the warm air is 
not rising very fast. 

The stratus cloud is 1 

the lowest Of all Stratus 

clouds. It may become a fog by falling to the earth.” 

The curly clouds, Daddy said, were “cirrus.” because 
“cirrus” means a “curl” or lock of hair. 

“They are not low,” he said, “like stratus clouds, but 
high. So high that they are probably made out of ice 




























































50 


A DROP OF WATER 



crystals. They some¬ 
times form a ring 
around the sun or the 
moon. We call this 
ring a halo. Cirrus 
clouds are sometimes 
called mare’s tails or 
cat’s tails.” 


The white-of-egg 
clouds, they found 

out, were “cumulus,” 
because “cumulus” 
means a “heap” and 
these clouds were 

heaped up in the sky. 

They were not so low 
as the stratus, nor so 

high as the cirrUS Cumulus 

clouds. And they came usually during the hottest part 
of the day. 

Then there was the “nimbus,” or storm cloud, and that 
was the cloud from which rain fell. 

They looked at the pictures a long time, the little girl 
as much interested now as Ted. 

“Let’s see,” said Ted, “if we can say their names.” 























A DROP OP WATER 


51 


And so they tried, 
with Daddy to help 
them, until they could 
say them all. “Stratus, 
or layer cloud; cirrus, 
or curly cloud; cumu¬ 
lus, or heap cloud ; 
and nimbus, or storm 
cloud.” 

“But, Daddy,” Ted reminded him, “you haven’t told us 
about the rainbow yet.” 

“Well,” said Daddy, “you know we talked about Sir 
Isaac Newton the other day. I could tell you a good 
many things about him. 

“One of the things he liked to do was to look through 
the three-cornered pieces of glass that hung from a lamp 
his mother had. When he looked through such a glass, 
he saw all kinds of pretty colors, red and blue and yellow. 
Such a piece of glass is called a prism. 

“When he grew up he remembered about this and began 
to try to see what caused it. He bored a hole in a window 
shutter so that only a very small bit of light came through. 
He called this a ray of light. When the sun shone on 
ihe shutter, a sunbeam went through the hole into the 



room. 













52 


A DROP OP WATER 


“The room was quite dark. He put a prism in the way 
of the light and on the white wall of the room he saw a 
pretty rainbow. 

“This was not a real rainbow; it only looked a little 
like one. No one had ever seen this before; it was quite 
new; so it had to have a name; so Sir Isaac called it a 
spectrum. There was something else funny about this 
spectrum; it was not in a straight line with the ray of light 
that came through the shutter, but was bent to one side. 
This seemed very curious. Then he remembered that 
when he stuck a stick into a tub of water the stick looked 
as if it were bent. He went on thinking about this until 
he began to see how it was; the light was bent sure 
enough, and that was what was the matter. The stick 
was not bent at all; it only seemed to be bent; it was really 
just as straight as ever. But why did the spectrum show 
so many colors ? There were red places and purple places 
and yellow and blue places; and they were shaded into 
one another, so as to look lovely. After he had thought 
about this quite a while he made up his mind there must 
be many kinds of light in a sunbeam. The sunbeam 
seemed to be white light but it was really made up of 
light of many colors, and when we get these colors to¬ 
gether they seem white. Isn’t that funny? Don’t you 
think Sir Isaac must have been a pretty smart man? 

“After this Sir Isaac began to remember about the rain¬ 
bow, and he said to himself: ‘I wonder if drops of water 


A DROP OF WATER 


53 


behave like prisms?’ So he tried it, and lo and behold, 
they do. Then he knew why we have rainbows and 
haloes. It is because the drops break up the light just as 
a prism does.” 

“Then a rainbow,” said Ted, “is broken sunbeams.” 

“Precisely,” said Daddy. “When the sun shines 
through the rain we see, not a white light, but a light 
broken up into red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo 
and violet. Can you say them?” 

So they said them. “Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, 
indigo and violet.” 

“And that makes a rainbow,” said Ted. 


CHAPTER X 


Ted and the little girl next door were going on a picnic. 
Daddy and Mother and the little girl’s family were going 
too, though you might not have known that from the plans 
the two made across the hedge. To be sure they would 
not have gotten far without the car, nor stayed long with¬ 
out lunch. And since the little girl’s Daddy was going to 
drive the car, and the two mothers were putting up the 
lunch, it was necessary to take them along. But as for 
the fun they were going to have—well, if it takes older 
people to look after cars and lunches, it takes little people 
to provide the fun. 

So they both wakened early and had breakfast before 
the sun was high, and then they started. They drove for 
miles and miles, first along the river, which looked like a 
smooth broad piece of silver; then past a village, where 
children ran barefoot, and where a big mill-wheel kept 
turning. It looked green and mossy, and the water kept 
dripping from it as it turned. 

Then they drove through the woods, along a road that 
climbed higher and higher. The trees almost met over¬ 
head, and it smelled very sweet of birch and pine. At 
last they same to an opening in the trees. Plere there was 
green grass, with ferns around the edge. And here they 
left the car and put down their baskets. 

Ted and the little girl ran pell-mell through the woods, 
where the sunlight played hide and seek through the trees. 


A DROP OF WATER 


55 


There was a rush of wings as the birds twittered and flew 
away. Only a chipmunk, bright-eyed and saucy, curled 
up his tail and watched them from a rock. 

It was so still there you could fairly hear the stillness. 
It hummed like bees. It trickled like water. It rustled 
like leaves. It was sweet there too among the trees, and 
sweeter yet when they walked and trampled down the 
ferns. 

“It smells like—like summertime,” said Ted. 

“It smell like ham sandwiches to me,” said the little 
girl. And she ran back to her mother and the baskets. 

When everything was ready Ted and Daddy went for 
the water. They had to go some distance through the 
woods. And when they got to the place they had to push 
the leaves away before they could dip down and get the 
water. It was very cold and very clear. 

“Fine spring water,” said Daddy, as he took a long 
drink of it. 

Ted took a long drink of it too. And then they carried 
a big pailful back to the others. They filled the glasses. 
The little girl had hers in her silver mug. 

“Oh-o-o,” she cried. “There’s a bug in mine.” 

There was. Ted poured the water hastily on the grass. 

“There,” he said, filling her cup again, “there are no 
bugs in it now. That one must have come off the leaves.” 

“What leaves?” 

“The leaves that were on the water.” 

Her nose curled up in the air. 


56 


A DROP OF WATER 


“I don’t want water with leaves in it,” she said. “And 
bugs!” 

The little girl’s Daddy laughed. 

“Whoa, kitten,” he said. “Worse things than leaves get 
into water. And you can drink worse bugs in the city 
than you are ever likely to on a hillside.” 

She looked at him with her nose still in the air. “I 
never drank a bug,” she said. 

“Not if you knew it. But the worst bugs are the kind 
you can’t see.” 

“Why can’t you see them?” 

“Because they are too small. Now don’t you think you 
need a sandwich?” 

She nodded her head, and asked no more questions. 

“Fine spring water,” said Mother, just as Daddy has 
said. 

“What is spring water?” asked Ted. He thought it 
must be some new kind. 

“Why—why—just spring water, dear. Water that 
comes out of a spring.” 

Everybody was eating lunch by this time, so Ted said 
nothing more. Anyway the sandwiches were so good he 
forgot everything else. 

But afterward while the little girl was taking a nap 
and the two mothers were knitting, he went with Daddy 
again to the spring. 

“What makes spring water different from other 
water?” he asked. 


A DROP OF WATER 


57 


“It isn’t different, Ted. It is the same kind of water 
you saw in the village turning that big mill-wheel. And 
the same kind that flows in the river. Only up here on 
the side of the hill it is fresh and pure.” 

“Why?” asked Ted. 

“Because when water falls from the sky in the form 
of rain, it is perfectly pure. After it falls either of two 
things may happen to it; it may either sink into the soil 
or run away over the surface into the nearest stream. 
If it sinks into the soil it passes on down until it strikes 
a bed of clay or a solid rock through which it cannot 
pass. Then it runs along the top of the clay bed or rock 
until it reaches an opening. Here it comes up to the sur¬ 
face in the form of a spring. 

“Nearly all springs have nice cool water flowing from 
them all the time. A few springs dry up in the dry sea- 
son, but many of them never run dry though much less 
water flows from them in very dry weather. 

“I know a place where there are six or seven springs; 
several dry up in dry weather, but some of them go on 
running even in dry spells. One of them comes out at 
the bottom of a very high hill, almost a mountain. It is 
quite a large spring but never dries up. Another spring 
comes out along the side of a creek; still another comes 
to the surface half way up another hill. Upon the side 
of this same hill at different places and different heights 
other springs break out. If we dig holes in the ground 
and get them deep enough we always come to water. 


5§ 


A DROP OF WATER 


These holes are almost always lined with stone walls 
and are called wells. Many people depend altogether 
upon wells for their water. 

“Now whether the water runs along on the top of the 
ground in small streams, or runs under the ground and 
comes out in springs, it carries other things with it. 

“It carries mud and sand, of course, and the farther 
it goes the more it carries. That is why water from a 
spring or well is purer than water from a river. 

“But it also carries other things like salt, lime, iron and 
flint. That is why water from a well or spring is apt to 
be ‘hard,’ while rain water is ‘soft,’ as we say.” 

“Hard?” said Ted. “Water couldn’t be hard.” 

“No, not hard like a stone. But we call it ‘hard’ be¬ 
cause it has something like stone in it. If you take water 
from a well or spring and boil it in a tea-kettle, you are 
likely to find a hard crust on the inside of the kettle. 
That is because the water has flowed over limestone, 
perhaps, and has picked up some of the lime and carried 
it along. 

“There are also iron-springs and sulphur-springs and 
salt-springs. People sometimes go to these springs and 
drink the water because they think the iron or sulphur 
or salt in the water will be good for them. 

“The water from springs flows along until it forms a 
stream. Streams join each other and form rivers. The 
rivers flow on to the ocean. So all the lime and iron and 


A DROP OF WATER 


59 


sulphur and salt which the streams have gathered up finds 
its way into the ocean at last. This makes the ocean 
so salty and bitter that we cannot drink it. 

‘‘Every drop of water that flows through the earth or 
over it carries something with it. The farther it goes the 
more it carries. That is why the purest water is rain 
water which has just come down from the sky. Or 
spring water, which is only starting on its way to the sea. 

“We often catch rain water and hold it in cisterns, 
or spring water in wells. Sometimes, however, people 
take very poor care of these cisterns or wells and let dirty 
water, worms, toads, and mice get in. Then the water 
gets nasty and unfit to drink. Sometimes people who 
drink such water get very sick. Typhoid fever, dysen¬ 
tery, cholera, and a good many other diseases are caused 
by bad water. Those people who do not take good care 
to keep their wells and cisterns clean are very foolish, 
for there is no more easy way to get sick than by drinking 
bad water.” 

“I wouldn’t drink bad water,” said Ted proudly. 

“Not if you knew it,” said Daddy. “ But you cannot 
always tell when water is bad. It may look clear and 
have no bad smell and yet be bad.” 

“Have bugs in it?” asked Ted. He was thinking about 
the little girl and her silver mug. 

“Yes, just the kind of bugs you heard about to-day. 
They are so small no one can see them. But if they once 


6o 


A DROP OF WATER 


get inside of your body they increase and make you very 
sick.” 

“Ugh,” said Ted, “I’ll never drink any.” 

“I hope not,” said Daddy. “But you easily might if 
it were not for the men who study to keep our drink¬ 
ing water pure.” 

“How do they keep it pure?” 

“One way is by boiling it. If you boil water you kill 
the little bugs—or germs, as we call them. Another way 
is to use a filter.” 

“What is a filter?” 

“A filter is sometimes a bed of sand. As the water 
flows through the sand the germs—or bugs—are caught 
and held while the water passes on. This is a kind of 
natural filter. But there are other kinds of filters too, 
which can be made, some of them small enough to use 
in the house. But they have to be kept clean, which is 
sometimes a trouble, so, on the whole, it is better to have 
water that is pure and clean to begin with.” 

“Like this,” said Ted. And he stooped down to dip 
up another big drink of cool spring water. 



CHAPTER XI 


It was very lonelv in the vard. The little girl next 
door had gone away. She had gone on a trip with her 
father and mother to the Pacific Coast. But there was 
one good thing about it. Her mother wrote letters to 
Ted's mother. And there was so much in them about 
things that were new that Ted could scarcely wait to hear 
them read. 

They had seen springs of water so hot that the water 
boiled. One place a man was fishing in a stream. And 
when he caught a fish he put it into the boiling spring and 
cooked it. Ted thought that this could not be true, but 
Daddy said that it was. 

‘‘But how did the water get hot?" asked Ted. 

“Well,” said Daddy, “do you remember how you 
learned that the earth was once a part of the sun? And 
how it turned so fast that it cooled off on the outside?" 

“Yes,” said Ted. 

“Well, the earth has never cooled off all the way down 
to the center. It is still hot inside. It is so hot that it 
can melt rocks. And in some places there are mountains 
with a hole in the top. These mountains are called vol¬ 
canoes. The hole is called the crater. And through this 
crater the melted rock is sometimes thrown high into 
the air.” 


“Gee,” said Ted, “I’d like to see one." 


6 2 


A DROP OF WATER 


“Perhaps you will some day, though there are not many 
volcanoes in America. The most famous volcano, per¬ 
haps, is Vesuvius in Italy, though there are many of them 
in South America and other parts of the world.” 

“And do they throw out rocks all the time?” 

“No, not all the time. They may be quiet for hundreds 
of years and then suddenly begin to throw out steam and 
ashes and the melted rock, which we call lava. When 
they do that we say the volcano is active, or is in erup¬ 
tion. Can you remember that word ?” 

“E-eruption,” said Ted. 

“Now there are volcanoes along the Pacific coast in 
our own country but they are not active. We know by 
their shape that they are volcanoes, but they are not 
throwing out lava. They do something else, however, 
they heat the water that flows underground and so we 
have hot springs. 

“There are hot springs in many places in the western 
part of our country. The Indians used to drink from 
them. They had many strange stories about them. They 
told a story about one spring that was very salty. They 
said that there was once an Indian chief who had beauti¬ 
ful daughter. Two young warriors each wanted to marry 
her, so they fought for her on the edge of a cliff. In 
fighting, both young men fell from the cliff and were 
killed. Then the young girl threw herself from the cliff 
and was killed too. Her father, the old chief, sat on the 


A DROP OF WATER 


63 


hillside and wept so many tears over his daughter that 
they flowed down and formed the salty spring.” 

The next letter from the little girl’s mother told about 
something more wonderful still. They were in Yellow¬ 
stone Park and had seen not only hot water in a spring, 
but hot water shooting high into the air. This was called 
a geyser, and they had seen many geysers. 

It was a wonderful place to be, she said, because here 
there were once active volcanoes. But all that was left 
now to show that they had been active was the presence 
of hot springs and of geysers. 

The first place they went to was like a small hill or 
mound which was snow white. It was known as “White 
Mountain.” It was so white that one felt as if it must 
be soft too like snow. But it was not. It was hard as a 
rock. It was built up like steps, some narrow and some 
wide. But the top was level. And on this level place 
there was a spring. 

The water of the spring was hot and very clear. So 
clear that looking one way you could see in it a picture 
of the clouds overhead, as if it were a looking-glass. So 
clear that looking straight down you could see all the way 
to the bottom. 

The water flowed over the edge, as it would over the 
rim of a wash-basin. And wherever it flowed it left the 
ground white. This was because there was lime in the 
water. And so while you felt as if you must be walking 
5 


6 4 


A DROP OF WATER 


on hardened snow, you were really walking over snow- 
white limestone. 

And the water did not flow straight down on all sides 
from the main basin. Instead it kept forming new 
smaller basins. These were beautiful to look at. You 
might have supposed someone had carved them out of 
marble. And the edges reminded you of pearls. 

Sometimes the color was rich cream at the bottom, 
and sometimes even bright yellow. There were even 
streaks of red to be found. 

As the water flowed down the steps from basin to 
basin, it gradually cooled, so that one could have taken 
a bath in it, as warm or as cool as one wished. 

In fact people did take baths in the water. Sick peo¬ 
ple came there to drink the water and to take baths in it. 
The water was drawn off in pipes for them to use. 

And then Daddy told Ted that there were just such 
springs in other parts of the world where sick people 
went to bathe and to drink the water. Some of them 
were very famous and many people were cured of dis¬ 
ease by going to them. And all because the water had 
in it some of the rock over which it had flowed. 

The letter went on to tell about the next place they 
went. They travelled along Firehole River. The water 
of this river was warm. And streams of warm water 
flowed into it from all sides. It was a very strange place. 
All around were mud holes which kept bubbling up. 
The ground sounded hollow under their feet. 


A DROP OF WATER 


65 


There were mud holes that puffed out sulphur and 
water; there were great openings that looked big enough 
to swallow a horse; there were boiling streams that 
flowed over a crust of yellow, green, and red. 

There were lovely pools of blue water, but before you 
could get near them a puff of steam would dart out of 
the path under your feet. The air was full of strange 
noises, which made you feel as if you were in a factory 
of some dreadful kind. 

The first geyser they saw was “Old Faithful.” They 
called it that because the water shoots up regularly every 
hour. It stood on a mound something like the one known 
as “White Mountain.” There were the same kind of 
little basins in it, filled with hot water. 

The chimney of the geyser was taller than a man. 
Steam was coming from it all the time. And then every 
hour the water would begin to push up with a gurgling 
sound. Each time it would rise a little higher until at 
last with a great roar it would shoot away up into the 
air. After about five minutes the water would fall back 
again into the basin. It would then flow over the edge 
and down the sides. 

Another geyser called the “Giantess” was still bigger. 
The water would boil out of this, sending great clouds 
of steam into the air. It would rise, not only in one main 
stream, but also in many smaller ones. These would 
cross each other, and where the sun shone on them would 


66 


A DROP OP WATER 


sparkle and look like rainbows. Around the clouds of 
steam would be a bright ring of color, a halo, with all 
the colors of the rainbow. It was very beautiful. 

Near to one of the geysers was a kind of cave, called 
the “Grotto.” Some of the first people who saw it years 
ago thought it really was a cave and went in. It had 
beautiful stone pillars and arches, which they wanted to 
look at. Fortunately it was not until after they had come 
out that it began to gurgle too, and soon it threw steam 
and hot water up sixty feet into the air. Sixty feet 
would be ten times as high as a man, so they were glad 
they were out. 

The most wonderful one of all was called the “Grand 
Geyser.” Before an eruption the basin would fill with 
boiling water, and there would be a great rumbling in 
the earth. Then big clouds of steam would rise into the 
sky. After that the water would shoot up ninety feet. 
And from the top of this, smaller jets would rise as high 
as two hundred and fifty feet. There would be a hiss¬ 
ing sound in the air. And the earth would tremble as 
the water from the great fountain would fall back. Many 
rainbows would sparkle around the top of it. 

No trees or grass could grow around the geysers be¬ 
cause the hot water with sulphur or lime or other things 
in it would kill them. If any living tree or animal did 
find its way there the water would turn it to stone. Pine 
cones had been fished out of hot springs, turned to stone 


A DROP OF WATER 


67 


or petrified, as we say, also butterflies and grasshoppers, 
which had accidentally fallen in. 

But the biggest news was that just before they left 
Yellowstone Park a new geyser, the biggest one of all, 
began to be active. No one was expecting such a thing, 
when suddenly a quiet mud pool sent steaming hot mud 
and rocks three hundred feet into the air. The road over 
which they had just driven was covered with water and 
they themselves were almost hit by rocks which were 
thrown up. They did not like to be quite so intimate with 
a geyser as this, and wished that the big fountain had 
sent out word when it was going to perform. 

But still it was interesting to be right there to see it. 
And before they came away they heard that it was going 
to be named Semi-Centennial, because that word means 
fifty years, and it was fifty years since Yellowstone Park 
was opened. 


CHAPTER XII 


One of the letters told about seeing the Colorado Can¬ 
yon. Mother read it in a hurry. She was just dressing 
to go out. Ted hoped she would read it to him. But in¬ 
stead she began putting on her hat. It took Mother some 
time to put on her hat. He wondered why. He could 
put on his hat while he was running down the street 
after Daddy. 

“What is a canyon?” asked Ted. 

Mother pushed the roses a little lower over her ear. 

“Oh, just a—a kind of gorge, dear.” 

“Oh,” said Ted. He wondered what a gorge was. But 
by this time Mother had pulled the front door shut after 
her. So he had to think it out by himself. He rather 
thought that Colorado was the name of a state. And a 
canyon was a gorge. And a gorge was—well, perhaps 
it was an animal. Something like an Angora goat. 

He asked Nora but Nora did not know. So there was 
nothing to do but wait until Daddy came home. It was 
lonely, too, waiting, with Mother away and no little girl 
to play with. He sat very still on the porch and kept 
wondering whether a Colorado Canyon had four legs 
or two. 

At last he saw Daddy coming down the street. He 
ran to meet him. “Daddy,” he cried, “what is a Colorado 
Canyon? Is it anything like an elephant?” For you see 
by this time he was sure it must an animal. 


A DROP OF WATER 


69 


Daddy laughed all over his face as he took hold of 
Ted’s hand. “Yes,” he said, “it’s a good deal like an 
elephant—in one way. It’s the biggest thing of its kind.” 

“What kind?” asked Ted. 

“Suppose we talk about it when we get to the house,” 
said Daddy. 

His face had sobered down now—all but his eyes. But 
Ted knew there was a joke somewhere. He knew too 
that Daddy would tell him after awhile. That was one 
thing about Daddy. He always shared his jokes. And 
while he often laughed with you, he never laughed at 
you. 

“Did you ever watch the water making little gulleys 
in the garden when it rained?” he asked. 

“What is a gulley?” asked Ted. 

“A gulley is a path that the water makes for itself 
when it runs off the earth in streams.” 

“Then I have,” said Ted. “I watched it a long while 
the day we saw hailstones. The rain ran down like— 
like anything. It made holes in some places. And it ran 
off just the way you say in—in gulleys.” 

“Then you have some idea,” said Daddy, “of the 
strength or force of water. And just as a small stream 
will wash out a gully, so a large stream or river will 
make a path for itself called a gorge or canyon.” 

“Oh,” cried Ted, “is that a canyon?” 


70 


A DROP OP WATER 


“It is. And the Colorado Canyon is the path which 
the Colorado River has cut for itself through the rock.” 

“Through the rock! How could it cut through rock?” 

“By the force of the water. Would you think water 
had so much force?” 

“No,” said Ted soberly. He was thinking how the 
raindrops chased each other down the window pane that 
day; how they ran into each other and formed streams; 
how the streams joined and formed larger streams; how 
they finally dropped to the ground and ran off down the 
garden. And yet to begin with they were just single 
raindrops. 

“Well,” said Daddy, taking up just what Ted was 
thinking of, “a raindrop isn’t very big. But if you put 
enough raindrops together, they can do almost anything. 
And a river is just a great number of raindrops. 

“There is more rain falling too in some places than in 
others, and that has something to do with the size of 
rivers. There are places in the middle west where there 
are rushing streams when the spring rains come. But 
in the summer there is no water in them at all because 
there is no rain. 

“On the Pacific coast, however, the rainfall is nearly 
twice as much as it is in some other parts of our country. 
And this rainfall feeds such big streams as the Colorado 
River, which begins, or rises as we say, in the Rocky 
Mountains and flows south for twelve hundred miles 


A DROP OF WATER 


7 T 

until it empties into the Gulf of California. It is while 
crossing the state of Arizona that it has worn the deep 
path or gorge known as the Grand Canyon.” 

‘‘Gee,” said Ted, “that must be some river.” 

“It is,” said Daddy. “It is an elephant of a river.” 
And again his eyes were laughing. 

“But after all it is not very different from the trout 
stream where we camped in the spring, except that it is 
much, much bigger. For all rivers are formed in about 
the same way. 

“Most of them rise in the mountains, flow swiftly 
down narrow gorges, cross the lower land through val¬ 
leys, and then flow away quietly across the plains to the 
ocean. Some one has named these three stages, the 
mountain track, the valley track, and the plain track of 
a river. Of course not every river has just these three 
tracks, but most of them have. 

“Now a river not only finds a path for itself. It also 
helps to make one as it goes. When it starts from some 
small spring it has little in it but pure water. And this 
water has little force. As it goes along, however, it 
uses what little force it has to gather up sand or gravel. 
And this sand or gravel helps to wear away the rocks 
over which the water flows. It is a good workman. It 
picks up its tools as it goes. 

“By the use of these tools it keeps hammering away 
at its path making it both deeper and wider. Also as 


72 


A DROP OP WATER 


it hammers at the rocks it breaks off pieces of them, and 
these pieces become in turn tools for further hammering. 
So that the farther the river goes, the more tools it 
picks up. 

“These tools, however, do not keep the same shape all 
the way. As they rub against each other, they wear off 
each other’s corners, so that in time they become almost 
round like marbles. That is why we can find pebbles 
in almost any stream of water. 

“Some one has said that there are places on the River 
Rhine where you can hear the pebbles grinding if you 
listen closely at the bottom of an open boat. 

“Now this grinding makes the path deeper, as we 
said, and since water flows faster the higher up it is, this 
grinding and deepening of its path goes on faster in the 
first stage of its journey, or the mountain track, as it is 
called. 

“When it reaches the second stage or valley track, it 
seems to widen its path more than it deepens it. There 
are several reasons for this. One is that the river uses 
its tools not only on the bottom of its path, but on the 
sides as well. And so it keeps pushing its banks farther 
and farther out. 

“But there is another better reason than this. The 
force of the water itself is greater by this time, because 
there is more of it, and it has a way of pushing first 
against one side, then against the other. 


A DROP OF WATKR 


73 


“This happens in all valleys, but especially in the wider 
ones. In this way the river keeps working on both of its 
banks. When it has pushed as far as it can in one direc¬ 
tion, it has a way of turning and pushing in the other. 
That is why we see so many bends or turns in some 
rivers. 

“Now all this grinding and pushing has been going on 
for years and years. And water can wear away any¬ 
thing, even hard rock, if it has time enough. 

“But there is a difference in the kind of country 
around rivers. Sometimes the earth is soft or sandy, and 
there are many small streams flowing through it. Then 
it is easy for these streams to find their way to the 
river. And so we have a broad valley, sloping down to 
a river which has no high banks. 

“On the other hand, if the country is very rocky, it is 
not easy for small streams to flow through it. Then the 
water is shut in between the rocks and forms a river. 
And the river, which cannot easily spread out, cuts 
deeper and deeper down into its path, or channel as we 
say. 

“This is what has happened to the Colorado River in 
Arizona. It cannot easily spread out because of the 
rocks, so it has cut deeper and deeper until it has formed 
the most wonderful gorge we have in America, called 
the Grand Canyon.” 


74 


A DROP OF WATER 


Just then Mother came home, and when she heard them 
talking about the Grand Canyon, she went to get the 
letter about it, and read it to them. 

“This is the most wonderful gorge in the world/’ the 
letter said. “You can look straight down half a mile to the 
bottom of it. It is fifteen miles wide in some places and 
so brightly colored that it looks like one big paint pot.” 

“Colored?” said Ted. “I thought it was just rocks.” 

“It is,” said Daddy. 

“I think there was a picture of it in the letter,” said 
Mother, and she went back to her room to look for it. 

“How could rocks be colored?” asked Ted. “Except 
just gray, of course.” 

“Rocks can be any color,” said Daddy. “Some of the 
brightest colors in the world are found in rocks.” 

By that time Mother had found the picture. And 
sure enough there were the colors, blue and yellow and 
red, just like stripes in a ribbon. Ted kept looking at 
it while she went on with the letter. 

“Think of all the brightest colors there are, painted on 
the steepest, highest rocks there are, and you will get 
some idea of the Grand Canyon. For the river year 
by year has cut down through one kind of rock after 
another, sandstones, white, yellow and red, and lime¬ 
stones gray and blue, until it has reached the hard red 
rock over which it now flows. With the sun shining on it 


A DROP OP WATER 


75 



Grand Canyon 














































;6 


A DROP OF WATER 


it is a picture never to be forgotten. We went down the 
Bright Angel Trail. You see it in the picture.” 

Ted handed the picture over to Mother, so that she 
could see the Trail. And as he did so, he found some¬ 
thing written on the other side. 

Why it was addressed to him! . And on it the little 
girl had written—or rather printed—“I WENT DOWN 
HERE ON A DONKEY.” 


CHAPTER XIII 


Ted sat thinking very hard one day not long after he 
had heard about the Grand Canyon. 

“Daddy/’ he said, “I should think if a river kept on 
cutting down the rocks long enough it would get so far 
down we couldn’t see it.” 

“Well,” said Daddy, “probably it would if that were 
the only thing it did. But all kinds of things are going 
on all the time around us. 

“One thing is that the land which slopes toward a river 
is constantly being washed down by rain and smaller 
streams. So if the river is getting lower down, its banks 
are getting lower down too. 

“Another thing is that the river does not spend all its 
time cutting away the rock. Part of the sand and 
gravel which it carries it leaves on the bottom or along 
the sides. So it partly tears down its path and partly 
builds it up.” 

Ted thought this was queer. 

“Do you remember how the water ran out into the 
alley one day when it rained hard? And it left such a 
pile of mud and sand that we couldn’t open the gate?” 

“Yes,” said Ted. “And I helped you shovel it away. 
And there were twigs and grass and all kinds of things 
in it.” 

“Well,” said Daddy, “there are all kinds of things in 
a river too. There are plants and dead branches and 


A DROP OF WATER 


/8 

leaves of trees. And the bones of animals that have 
died. And they keep floating along until they catch 
somewhere on a rock or a bend in the river. And there 
they stay. And after awhile other things come and catch 
there too, and so they get heaped up higher and higher. 

“Fortunately not all the things which a river carries are 
left along the sides. If they were, they would take up 
so much room that the river could hardly find a place to 
flow. Some one has figured out that our largest river, 
the Mississippi, carries enough in one year to make a 
pile one mile square, and two hundred and sixty-eight 
feet high.” 

“Gee,” said Ted, “how big would that be?” 

“Well, it would be as high as a very tall building and 
as large around as ten city blocks on each side.” 

“Gee,” said Ted again, “that would be some pile* 
What becomes of it all?” 

“Some of it flows into the Gulf of Mexico.” 

“What is the Gulf of Mexico?” 

“It is a piece of the ocean.” 

“And where does the rest go?” 

“It spreads out over the land.” 

“All of it?” 

“Well, no, not all of it. Some of it is always floating; 
in the water.” 

Ted went on thinking. 

“Gee,” he said, “a river is a funny thing.” 


A DROP OF WATFR 


79 


“A river is a mighty thing,” said Daddy. It is like a 
big servant which nature uses to help her. It is always 
carrying rock and sand and mud from the mountains, 
which are high, down to the plains, which are low. In 
this way nature seems to be trying to make all the land 
as nearly even as possible.” 

“Maybe some day it will be even all over,” said Ted. 

“I hardly think so,” said Daddy. “And this is one 
reason. The more sand and mud a river leaves on the 
plain, the less place it has to flow. And the less place 
it has to flow, the less strength it has to carry things 
with it. So a river gets tired and grows old after awhile, 
like a person.” 

“My,” said Ted, “a river is like a person, isn’t it?” 

“Yes. And some people think so much of rivers that 
they study them all their lives. These people tell us 
just how a river carries its load. 

“When it first starts on its journey from the mountains 
it tries to carry everything with it. But after awhile, 
like a traveler getting tired, it begins to drop first one 
thing and then another. And the things it drops first are 
the heaviest things, like rocks and pebbles. 

“A river may stop on its way, too, when it finds a 
rocky basin. It may fill this basin and become what we 
call a lake. When it flows out of this basin it becomes 
a river again. 

6 


8o 


A DROP OF WATER 


“But while it is there in the basin of the lake, it lays 
down a great deal of its load. 

“There are two kinds of lakes, fresh water and salt 
lakes. When a river flows into a lake basin and then 
flows out again, the water stays the same and the lake 
is a fresh-water lake. 

“However if the basin is very large and the river 
flowing into it is small, it may not flow out again. It 
may lie there until the water evaporates. You remember 
what that means?” 

“Yes,” said Ted. “It goes up into the air.” 

“Yes. And when it goes up into the air it leaves be¬ 
hind, not only the sand and pebbles it was carrying with 
it, but also the lime and salt and other things that had 
melted or dissolved in it. That makes the water that 
stays in the lake very salty. Such a lake is the Great 
Salt Lake in our own country. Another is the Dead 
Sea in Palestine, on the other side of the world. 

“The water in these lakes is so full of salt that if we 
should try to swim in it, it would buoy our bodies up 
so that we could not sink. From such lake basins we 
get much of the salt that we use on the table. 

“Sometimes, if the river is very small, it evaporates 
entirely after entering a lake basin, and the lake be¬ 
comes dry. It is then called a sinking river. But the 
river does not really sink. Instead it rises into the sky. 


\ 


A DROP OF WATER 


8l 


“Usually though, when a river enters a lake, it flows 
out again on the other side. And the lake is a fresh¬ 
water lake. 

“When the river has left its stones and pebbles be¬ 
hind, it still carries mud and rubbish. When it gets to the 
plain, it spreads these out in the shape of a fan. 

“Sometimes the point or handle of the fan will be 
quite high because the coarsest things are dropped there 
first. It may even be high enough to get in the way of 
the river, and so make it change its course to one side 
or the other. Or the river may cut right through it and 
form another fan farther on. 

“On the low ground all around, the river spreads out 
its carpet of mud, which is called a flood plain, a little 
higher every year. And then because it is higher, the 
river must find its way through it as best it can. 

“So it wanders this way and that, making new paths 
for itself from time to time. This is sometimes danger¬ 
ous, for when the spring rains come a river may over¬ 
flow its banks and do much harm. 

“The great river we just talked about, the Mississippi, 
does that very often. But at the same time that it does 
that, it does something else, too. In the first place it 
loses much of its force as it spreads out. And it also 
finds trees and shrubs that help to keep it from spread¬ 
ing too far. 


82 


A DROP OP WATER 


“But besides all this, it loses so much of its mud that 
it builds up banks of it, and these banks help much to 
keep the river from going any farther. 

“Sometimes when there is a small flood, the water 
goes over these banks and then settles back again. Then 
you can see the banks quite plainly between the main 
part of the river, and the part which has flowed over 
into the fields and meadows beyond. 

“Sometimes too, a river builds up steps along its way. 
Each step is higher than the one before as you go farther 
up the river. You may see them on one side or on both 
sides of the river. They are what is left of old flood 
plains. As the river leaves each flood plain, it spreads 
out and widens its valley. So that much of the plain is 
covered. That is why you sometimes see the steps only 
on one side of the river. 

“When you reach the end of a river, where it empties 
into the ocean or some part of the ocean, you may see a 
three-sided piece of land called a delta. This is where 
the river has left the last of its load.” 

“A—a—what?” asked Ted. 

“A delta. The Greeks named it that, because it looked 
like one of the letters they used, to spell with, called 
delta.” 

“Oh,” said Ted. 

“This delta is made up of mud which is very good for 
things to grow in. In some places farmers depend on 


A DROP OP WATER 


83 


it for getting good crops. The most famous deltas are 
those of the Mississippi in our own country and of the 
Nile over in Egypt. 

“The farmers in Egypt have been growing crops for 
thousands of years. They could not have had these 
crops except for the River Nile. For Egypt is a hot 
country and has almost no rain. 

“Each year, however, the Nile overflows its banks, 
and in the wet mud it spreads out, grain grows to feed 
the people. If it were not for this wet mud, the people 
would starve. 

“It has been feeding the people all these thousands of 
years. So it is no wonder that long ago, before people 
knew as much as they know now, they thought the river 
was a god, and they worshiped it. 

“That was funny,” said Ted. 

“Not any funnier than some things people do now. 
But even if we do know that a river is not a god, we 
must not forget that a river is a good friend. It gives 
us water to drink, to bathe in, to wash our clothes and 
our dishes in. And it also helps to give us the food we 
eat. So a river is one of the best friends we have.” 


CHAPTER XIV 


The next postcard which the little girl sent was from 
Kentucky. They were on their way to the Mammoth 
Cave. Ted hoped they would send a letter about the 
cave. He wondered what it looked like. 

Daddy said that it had been carved by water in very 
much the same way that a river cuts out its path. But 
Ted could not quite understand this. It would take a 
good deal of water to do much carving. And how could 
a good deal of water get down into a cave? 

He was thinking about it the day that they took a 
trolley ride over to some new works that Daddy wanted 
to see. One of the things they saw there was a kind of 
fountain, where the water shot up from a pipe into the 
air, as it did in the fountain in the park. 

Ted wondered about this and Daddy told him it was 
an Artesian well. He said that over in France there 
was a place called Artois, and once upon a time the 
people living there found that by boring into the earth 
they could find water. This water they did not have to 
lift out in buckets as people do from some wells. It 
would rise itself, so that it could be carried for some 
distance in pipes. This was the first well of the kind 
known, and because it was found near Artois it was 
called Artesian. 

There have been many such wells dug since then, 
Daddy said, and the water from them has been carried 


A DROP OF WATER 


35 


in pipes, just as the water from this well they were look¬ 
ing at was going to be carried in pipes to supply these new 
works. 

“But why does it rise?” asked Ted. 

“Well,” said Daddy, “this water came in the first 
place from somewhere up in the mountains. And water 
has a strange habit. When it gets a chance it always 
tries to rise again as high as the place it came from. 

“It has been flowing underneath the rocks where it 
could not get out, until men dug a hole straight down 
to where it was and put in a pipe. Then it was so glad 
to get out it came straight up the pipe as far as it could 

go” 

“Flowed underneath the rocks?” said Ted. “I thought 
water flowed over the rocks.” 

“It does both. There is only one place where you can 
dig an Artesian well. That is where the water is shut 
in between the rocks. Then when you dig through the 
upper rock the water rushes up through the pipe.” 

“That sounds,” said Ted, “as if there were rivers 
under the ground.” 

“There are,” said Daddy. “There are rivers and lakes 
and waterfalls underground.” 

“There are?” said Ted. “And you can’t even see 

them!” 

“Oh, yes, you can,” said Daddy. “Sometimes.” 

“Where ?” 


86 


A DROP OF WATER 


“Well, the Mammoth Cave in Kentucky is one place." 

“In Kentucky? Why, that’s where—’’ 

“Exactly. That’s where your postcard came from.’’ 

“Tell me about it,’’ cried Ted excitedly. 

“The Mammoth Cave,’’ said Daddy, “is the best-known 
cave or cavern that we have in America, but all caves 
are formed in much the same way. 

“Of course there are some caves which have been 
formed by lava from volcanoes. The lava, you know, 
is boiling hot when it spurts up out of the crater. But 
gradually it cools, and as it cools it hardens on top. This 
leaves a space underneath. You may see the same thing 
in winter if you look at a brook after a warm rain. The 
water flows away under the ice which is partly melted, 
so that you can see something like a roof of ice with a 
space underneath. 

“Of course this ice roof soon melts, but a lava roof 
does not. It may last for years and years and years. 
And then some day it may crumble away and show the 
cave underneath it, that has been there all the time. 

“And there is another kind of cave found along the 
seashore. Such caves are made by the beating of the 
waves. When the coast is rocky, the water dashes very 
hard against the rocks in time of storm. Often the 
waves have pebbles in them. These pebbles, striking the 
rocks, soon cut an opening in them. When the opening 
is once made, the sea washes in and out, and in and 
out, until it has made quite a cave. 


A DROP OF WATER 




Sometimes when the water rushes into these caves 
during a storm, the spray rises high into the air. Then 
the cave is called a spouting horn. 

“But neither the lava caves nor the sea caves are 

very beautiful. The caves formed by underground water 

_ —^ 99 
are. 

“How does the water get underground?" 

“Some of it soaks through the soil. The roots of 
plants and trees drink part of this. But the rest drips 
on down until it finds rock. 

“If this rock is very hard, the water keeps on flowing 
over it. If it is soft like limestone, the water begins 
to wear it away. This wearing away makes caves or 
caverns. 

“Now it happens that in Kentucky there is a great deal 
of limestone, so there are a great many caves. Some of 
them are so small that the water can hardly find its way 
through them in a rainy time. Others are very large. 
The Mammoth Cave is the largest of them. 

“We can find out how these caves have been formed by 
looking carefully at the land. The country is high and 
level there. The rocks underneath have not been tilted 
about as they have been in some other places. 

“There are only large streams there, and these flow in 
gorges with high rocks on each side. So whatever water 
flows into them from the sides must flow in under the 
ground instead of on top. 


88 


A DROP OF WATER 


“There are no valleys in between the rivers as there 
are in most places. But we do find something else. We 
find sink holes. 

“The water that runs off from the earth when it rains 
goes into these sink holes. There it runs down through 
an opening in the rocks that is like a pipe except that it 
is rough and jagged. When it is raining hard you can 
sometimes hear the water running down, as you could 
hear it run into a cistern. 

“Sometimes the opening is so large that a man can be 
let down into it by a rope. In this way people have 
studied caves and the way they are made. For the 
opening at the bottom of the sink hole is the smallest 
part of this rough pipe. It gets wider and wider until 
it opens out into a cave. These caves may be any shape. 
They may be large or small. But if we study one we 
know how all of them are made. 

“There are generally paths through the rock going out 
on the sides as we go down. And when we reach the 
bottom it is full of water. 

“We find other things though besides water at the 
bottom of the cave. There are rocks and stones there, 
especially flint, that hard stone which the Indians used. 
We sometimes see flint sticking out of the walls. The 
Indians used to come to these caves to get the flint for 
their arrow-heads. 


A DROP OF WATER 


89 


“These stones tell us a story. They are the tools which 
the water has used to carve out the cave in just the same 
way that a river uses tools to carve out its path. 

“We call the main part of a cave the ‘dome/ And 
opening out from it are more paths, or ‘galleries/ as 
they are called. These galleries are where the water used 
to run out before the cave had been cut down as low as 
it is now. 

“The bottom of a cave can never be lower than the 
nearby river. For the water in the cave flows into the 
river. But we know that a river keeps cutting its path 
lower and lower, and as it does so the water in the cave 
flows down lower too. So that new galleries are formed 
from time to time. 

“As the water flows down through these new galleries, 
it leaves the upper ones dry, and we may find them 
along the cliffs at the edge of the river and walk in 
through them into the cave. 

“This has been going on for so long that we may be 
seeing only the newer caves. There may have been 
others higher up that crumbled away before ever people 
lived about there. 

“There are many strange things about a cave. One 
is that it never grows hotter or colder there. The air 
is of the same warmth summer and winter. For this 
reason if you go down near the lower opening or mouth 
of a cave on a summer day you find a strong wind 


90 


A DROP OF WATER 


blowing. You may see the ferns and daisies waving be¬ 
fore you even get to the place. This wind is so cold it 
makes you shiver. And the hotter the weather, the 
stronger the wind. 

“And then if you go in the winter time to the sink 
hole over the top of the cave, you find the air pouring out 
there. But it is warm air. If the day is very cold this 
warm air may condense into a cloud of steam as it comes 
out. 

“The reason for this is plain. In the summer time the 
air in the cave is colder than the air outside. And cold 
air is heavier than warm air. Therefore this cold air 
lies at the bottom of the cave and comes up out of the 
lower opening. 

“But in the winter the air is warmer than the air out¬ 
side. So this warm air which is lighter rises and comes 
out of the top of the cave. 

“Caves have been used for many different things. 
People have lived in them, the Indians especially. We 
find Indian footprints all through the caves in Kentucky. 
The soft sand there will hold a footprint a long time. 
And we find tracks there of people who must have lived 
a hundred years ago. 

“We also find there the torches that they used. They 
made them by filling hollow canes with grease. 

“They must have hidden there in time of war. And 
there they buried their dead, with the little trinkets about 


A DROP OF WATER 


91 


them which they thought people would use in the other 
world. 

“White men used the caves too. They found salt¬ 
petre there, and saltpetre is used in making gunpowder. 



Salt Petre Piper 


When America was at war with England, much of the 
gunpowder they used was made with saltpetre from the 
Kentucky caves. 

“They use caves too for keeping fruits and vegetables. 
The dry air and even warmth will keep such things much 
better than they could be kept on top of the ground. 

“Animals also like to live in caves. Over in Europe 
there are caves which people have studied to find out 



















92 


A DROP OF WATER 


what kind of animals lived on the earth hundreds and 
hundreds of years ago. 

“These animals either lived in caves, or were drowned 
and their bodies washed into caves, or were killed by 
other animals and their bodies dragged into caves. 

“Their bones are still there. In the dry air of the 
cave these bones have kept their shape as they could not 
have done if they had been out on top of the earth. 
Men who study such things go there and piece these 
bones together. In this way they know what animals 
used to live on the earth as well as if they had seen 
pictures of them in a book.” 

“My,” said Ted, “that’s queer.” 

“Caves are books,” said Daddy, “in which we read 
about what happened before there were any people on 
the earth.” 

“Gee,” said Ted, “wish I could see one.” 


CHAPTER XV 


When they got home there was a letter there from the 
little girl’s mother. They had been through the Mam¬ 
moth Cave. 

“Oh, goody,” said Ted. “Now we’ll know what it’s 


It was very big, the letter said. So big that if one 
had time one could walk for days through places as wide 
and as high as a house. There were a hundred and fifty 
miles of walks through it. And it was only one of many 
such caves. There were eight thousand square miles of 
country just full of them. 


There were lakes 
and rivers and water¬ 
falls in it. One of the 
waterfalls was two 
hundred and fifty feet 
high. 

There were animals 
Echo River in ;t t°°- Some of 

them came in from the outside, just as bears do in the 
winter time. 



“Bears?” said Ted. “I don’t want to go there.” 
Daddy laughed. “Well, I don’t think the bears are 
there just now,” he said. “You know bears sleep all 
winter, and they often go into just such caves to do their 





























94 


A DROP OF WATER 


sleeping. The animals probably knew all about this 
cave before people did. For one day a hunter was fol¬ 
lowing an animal, and it ran in there. The man went 
in too, and found out what a big cave it was. That was 
how it was first known to white men, more than a hun¬ 
dred years ago.” 

There were bats there too in the winter time, so the 
letter said. If you went there then you could see them 
hanging from the ceiling in great bunches. Each one 
held on to the one above, and the top one held on to the 
ceiling. 

They would hang there as still as if they were dead. 
And yet when spring came they knew it. The air did not 
grow warmer in the cave as it did outside, and yet some¬ 
how they knew it was spring. So they would wake up 
then and go out again into the sunshine. 

But besides the beasts and birds who went into the 
cave to stay for awhile and then go out again, there 
were other things that lived there. There were fish and 
bugs of many kinds. And they were blind. 

“Blind?” said Ted. “How could they find their way 
in there?” 

But from the letter he found out that they did not need 
to find their way in there. They had always lived there. 
And that was why they were blind. For they were not 
just blind like some animal that has had its eyes hurt. 
They had no eyes at all. 


A DROP OP WATER 


95 


“No eyes!” said Ted. 

Then Daddy told him why they had no eyes. It was 
because the cave was so dark, that they could not use 



eyes to see with if they did have them. And nature has 
a way of taking from us anything that we do not use. So 
these fish and bugs had lost their eyes. 

Ted thought this was very queer. 

But the most beautiful things they saw in the cave 
were the stalactites and the stalagmites. 

“The—the—what?” said Ted. He thought he had 
never heard such big words before. 

Daddy smiled. “Isn’t there a picture of them in the 
letter?” he asked Mother. 

There was. They were beautiful pillars which some¬ 
body had built along the galleries of the cave. Ted 
wondered who it was that had built them. 

“Water built them,” said Daddy. 


7 














96 


A DROP OF WATER 


“Water?” cried Ted. 

“Yes. Water can build banks along the sides of a 
river. And water can build pillars up and down in a 
cave.” 

“How can it?” 

“Well, it builds them in two ways. You remember 
we learned that water has different things dissolved in 
it. When it flows through limestone and forms a cave it 
has lime dissolved in it. 

“Now as it trickles down through the ceiling of the 
cave drop by drop, it leaves a little of this lime sticking 
to the ceiling. Each drop that falls leaves a little more. 

“This white lime looks very pretty there. It takes 
strange shapes. It often looks like a bunch of flowers 
hanging from the ceiling. But the longer the water keeps 
dripping, the farther down the lime hangs. It is called 
a stalactite. 

“At the same time that the stalactite is forming, the 
water is dripping on the floor below. There it piles up a 
heap of lime too. And the longer it drips the higher the 
pile rises. This is called a stalagmite. 

“At last the stalactite reaches down and the stalag¬ 
mite reaches up until they join, and we have a solid white 
pillar. 

“The water keeps on dripping down this pillar, making 
it larger and larger until finally the whole gallery is 


A DROP OF WATER 


97 


filled with stalactites and stalagmites, and the water has 
to find some other way to get out.” 

“Gee,” said Ted, “I’d like to see it. Did you ever see 
a stal - stal - ” 

“Stalactite?” said Daddy. “Yes, I saw some very 
beautiful ones in the Luray Cavern, in Virginia. This 
is just such a cavern as the Mammoth Cave, only not so 
large. But it is famous for its stalactites. You can 
see forty thousand of them from one spot. 

“Some of them have been named. In one place you 
can see the Swords of the Titans, eight of them. They 
are fifty feet long, from three to eight feet wide, and 
from one to two feet thick. They are hollow, and if you 
strike them, they sound hollow. 

“As we went into the cavern, it was dark as night. 
Then our guide switched on the light, and we found 
ourselves in a kind of fairyland. Above us were the 
stalactites that looked like big icicles. Only instead of 
being the color of icicles, they were red or orange color 
or pink. 

“On the floor around us were the stalagmites reaching 
up to meet the stalactites. They were of all shapes. 
Sometimes they looked like animals or people as the 
light fell on them. 

“One of them was called the ‘Indian’s Blanket,’ and 
when the light shone on it you could see beautiful stripes 
and a colored border. 


9 8 


A DROP OF WATER 


“Another place was called Angels’ Wings, where the 
stalactites spread out snow-white over our heads. 

“The Ball Room looked as if it had been furnished 
with rich hangings and tall pillars. The guide said 
that twenty-three couples had been married in this place. 



Ball Room 


“In the Cathedral the stalagmites looked like the pipes 
of a great organ. And when the guide struck them with 
his fingers they sounded a little like an organ too. 

“Some of the stalactities look like sea-weed, and are 
of different colors, from dark brown to pale pink. In 
one place there is a figure that looks like a marble statute. 












































A DROP OF WATER 


99 



“One of the most beautiful lakes in the cavern is 
called the Silver Sea. 

“Not far from the Luray Cavern is the Natural 
Bridge. This bridge is made of limestone, of many 
colors. It is two hundred and fifteen feet high, and one 
hundred feet wide. It is big enough to bridge over 
Broadway in New York City.” 

“Who built that?” asked Ted. 

“Water built that too,” said Daddy. “Long ago the 
water rushed through a cave or cavern there. But after 
awhile the walls of this cave crumbled away and only 
the ceiling was left. This ceiling is the Natural Bridge.” 




















IOO 


A DROP OF WATER 



Natural Bridge, Virginia 


Ted thought this was wonderful. “Water can do most 
anything, can’t it, Daddy?” he said. 

“Yes,” said Daddy. “Water can tear down what man 
builds up, and build up what man would have a hard time 
tearing down. And yet water, which is so powerful, is 
a servant and friend to us all.” 








































CHAPTER XVI 


Ted was very happy. He was going on a trip too. He 
was going with Daddy and Mother to Niagara Falls. He 
wondered if the Falls would be as wonderful to look at 
as the geysers and the canyons and the caves that the 
little girl next door had been seeing. Daddy thought that 
it would. 

“What is a waterfall, Daddy?” he asked. “What does 
the water fall off of?” 

“It falls off of rock. You remember that there are 
many kinds of rock, some hard, some soft. When the 
water washes down through soft rock to hard rock be¬ 
low, it forms a cave. But if a river flows over hard 
rock and then over soft, it gradually washes the soft 
rock away, leaving the hard rock above. This forms 
what we call a rapid. It is dangerous to row a boat 
through rapids, for the water is very swift and very 
strong there. 

“But as time goes on the soft rock washes farther and 
farther down, while the hard rock stays much the same. 
So the water has farther and farther to go from the 
hard rock to the soft. This causes a waterfall. 

“There is a line of rocks like this, along which the 
rivers flow, from New York down into Virginia. It is 
called the Fall Line. There are many waterfalls along 
the way. 


102 


A DROP OF WATER 


“And just as a river uses the stones which it picks up 
to cut down its path, or to make a cave, so it uses them 
to cut away the soft rock below. So that after awhile 
there is a deep hole there, and the water has to make a 
big plunge to reach it. 

“But while the water and stones are making this deep 
hole they are doing something else too. They are boring 
back in under the ledge of hard rock over which they 
flow. After awhile there is such a hollow there that the 
hard rock has nothing to hold it up, so it falls down. 

“When it falls down it breaks, and the water uses the 
broken pieces as tools to cut away more of the soft rock 
underneath. So that a new waterfall is formed farther 
up the stream. In this way waterfalls keep moving 
from time to time.” 

“Does Niagara keep moving?” 

“Yes. Since it first began cutting away the rock it 
has moved seven miles. There is a gorge seven miles 
long where it used to flow.” 

“How long ago was that?” 

“Many, many years ago. More years than anybody 
knows except the people who study such things.” 

“How can they tell?” 

“By reading the rocks. Rocks are like sheets of 
paper, laid one above another. Each one has a story 
written on it.” 

“What kind of story?” 


A DROP OF WATER 


103 


A story of what the earth looked like so long ago. 
And of birds and fish and animals that lived before there 
were any people.” 

Gee,” said Ted, “there’s a lot to— to learn about, 
isn’t there?” 

It was a sunny morning when they reached the Falls. 
Ted could hardly wait to get there from the station. 
And when they did get there he thought he had never 
seen anything so wonderful in all his life. 

The sun was shining on the water. It looked like a 
great stretch of green glass. Only it was moving glass. 
There was so much of it, Ted almost held his breath 
when he looked at it. And it made so much noise he 
could not talk. 

After awhile they went down some long stairs and came 
to the bottom of the Falls. Here the water dashed so 
hard that they had to stand back to keep out of the spray. 
It seemed even bigger too looking up at it than it had 
from the top. Ted didn’t know water could fall so far. 

And yet Daddy told him that the Shoshone Falls in 
Idaho were higher, though not so large. And in South 
America and in Africa there were waterfalls still larger. 

They took a little boat called Maid of the Mist and 
went through the Whirlpool Rapids. They drove about 
Goat Island. They crossed the bridge into Canada. They 
took a trolley ride through the gorge. 


104 


A DROP OF WATER 


And then they came back to look and look and look 
at the Falls. One part was called Horseshoe Falls be¬ 
cause it was the shape of a horseshoe. One part of the 
Falls belonged to Canada and one part to the United 



Niagara Falls by Moonlight 


States. In the winter time, Daddy said, the spray would 
freeze and cover the rocks. Then it was even more 
beautiful than in summer. 

But there was one thing Ted kept thinking about. 
That was the force of it. It was beautiful, of course, but 
it was so powerful, too. 

“My, but it must dash hard ” he said. 

“It does,” said Daddy. “Hard enough to run factories 
and drive trolley cars.” 

“If they could only hitch it up to the factories and 
trolley cars,” said Ted. 













A DROP OF WATER 


105 


“They do hitch it up to factories and trolley cars,” 
said Daddy. 

“Really?” Ted looked doubtful. 

“Really. Water power has been used for a long time 
in the world. Men learned long ago how to build a dam 
across a stream of water when they wanted to use it for 
power. They still do that to-day. 

“They are talking right now about damming up the 
river Nile, the famous river we have talked about be¬ 
fore. The Blue Nile, as it is called, has many waterfalls 
and rapids. After awhile it flows into a large lake. 
When it flows out of this lake it goes on to join the main 
part of the river, called the White Nile. 

“This river, as you remember, overflows its banks 
and makes the soil very rich, so that it will grow good 
crops. And the British Government, which has control 
over some of the land in Egypt, thinks that more land 
still could be made rich enough for crops. 

“If they build a dam where the water of the Blue 
Nile flows out of the lake, the water will flow over the 
land instead. And there will be just that much more 
land on which to plant grain. 

“But generally they build dams to get power to run 
factories or mills, not to make soil to raise crops. 

“Do you remember the day we drove up on the hillside 
for our picnic? And the old mill we passed with a big 
water wheel?” 


io6 


A DROP OF WATER 


“Yes,” said Ted eagerly. “Where the children all ran 
barefoot.” 

“Yes,” said Daddy. “Well that old mill was run by 
water power. They had dammed up the stream and when 
it fell over the dam it kept turning the wheel around. 

“Now just such mill-wheels have been used for many 
years. And one day people began to think about Niagara. 
Why not use Niagara Falls to turn big mill-wheels, just 
as a small stream is used to turn smaller mill-wheels. 
So they set to work to think it out. 

“They found that five million tons of water go over 
the Falls every hour. And that that water has as much 
strength as three million horses to pull a load.” 

“How much is a million?” asked Ted. 

Daddy smiled. 

Then Ted remembered what Uncle Bob had once said 
about a million miles. It was more miles than you could 
walk if you went all the way around the earth. And 
three million horses—well that would be more horses 
than you could ever count, no matter how hard you tried. 

“You couldn’t even think three million horses, could 
you Daddy?” 

“No,” said Daddy, “I don’t believe you could. And yet 
Niagara can pull as big a load as three million horses.” 

“How do they make it pull loads?” 

“They build machinery.” 

“I didn’t see any.” 


A DROP OF WATER 


107 


“No, strange to say, there is no machinery at the 
Falls. But about a mile farther up the stream there are 
buildings that have machinery in them. Perhaps we can 
go inside.” 

As it happened, Daddy had a friend who could take 
them inside one of the buildings. It was called a power¬ 
house. There were great round things in it. They were 
called dynamos. And each one made power enough to 
do as much work as five thousand horses. 

There was no water turning wheels in the power¬ 
house. And yet the force of the water, by means of the 
dynamos, was making what we call electricity. And that 
electricity was running factories in the nearby city of 
Buffalo, and driving trolley cars along the gorge in 
Canada. 

Ted could not get done looking at those dynamos. 
They looked like big tops. And they never stopped 
spinning. They turned two hundred and fifty times a 
minute. 

The reason they never stopped spinning was that the 
water in the river was turning them. And the water 
never stopped flowing. Each dynamo turned on a rod. 
This rod ran away down into the ground. There it was 
fastened to a water wheel. This water wheel was turned 
by water from the river, which ran through a steel tube. 

They were allowed to go downstairs and see this water 
wheel. All the way down they kept seeing the rods on 


io8 


A DROP OF WATER 


which the dynamos turned. Daddy said the building 
burrowed underground like a mole. Fifty feet of it 
were above the ground, and the other one hundred and 
fifty feet were below. 

When they reached the lowest floor, they found that 
each rod ran into something big that was shaped like a 
turnip. From the sides of this turnip ran a steel tube. 
Through this tube the water came that turned the wheel 
inside the turnip. By the turning of this wheel the 
dynamos upstairs were kept spinning. 

Ted felt almost afraid. Suppose one of the steel tubes 
should burst. Then the whole Niagara River would pour 
in and drown them. He took tight hold of Daddy’s 
hand. 

He did not know which was more wonderful, the green 
water dashing over the rocks up above and sparkling in 
the sunshine; or the invisible, silent water in the steel 
tubes, running factories and driving trolley cars and 
lighting streets at night. 

Yes, water was beautiful. And water was powerful. 
For it was water alone that was doing this work. It was 
not steam. There was no coal used to boil the water to 
make steam, as they use coal in steam engines. It was 
just water itself. 

Ted looked at the dynamos again when they went up¬ 
stairs. There were eleven of them. And in the building 
on the other side of the river, he was told, there were ten 


A DROP OF WATER 


IO 9 


more. There would soon be five such buildings or power¬ 
houses, ready to send out power to other cities. 

He wondered what became of the water after it had 
flowed over the wheels and set the dynamos spinning. 
Daddy’s friend told him that it flowed away far under¬ 
ground and came out at last into the Niagara River be¬ 
low the Falls. 

One thing seemed very strange. The electricity made 
by the dynamos could be used not only right there near 
the Falls. It could also be carried to other cities. It was 
a long time before men found out how to do this. At 
last they found a way to carry electricity along wires to 
other places. Daddy told Ted that some day when he was 
cider he would be able to understand how this was done. 

But the electricity was used now in Buffalo and in 
Toronto. And some day it would be used as far away 
as New York and Chicago. 

Ted could hardly believe this. It had taken them all 
day to travel from New York to Niagara Falls. And yet 
sometime they might sit and read a book in New York 
by light which came from Niagara Falls. Surely water 
was a wonderful thing. There seemed to be almost 
nothing it could not do. 


CHAPTER XVII 

It was very cold one morning in December. So cold 
that Ted could not see out of his bedroom window. The 
window had been raised during the night. But when 
Mother came in and put it down, it was all covered with 
frost-work. Ted wondered how it ever got there. 

“Daddy,’’ he called. “Come see my window. It’s just 
like—like lace.” 

It was like lace. Daddy thought so too. 

“What makes it?” asked Ted. 

“What makes dew?” asked Daddy. 

“Why—why—con-den-sation,” said Ted. 

“Well, that makes frost too. You remember last sum¬ 
mer how the dew would lie thick on the garden in the 
morning ?” 

“Yes.” 

“Well, in the fall, it was frost, not dew, that you saw 
there.” 

“Oh, I know,” said Ted. Uncle Bob said he’d tell me 
all about it when the time came.” 

“Then we’ll make him do it,” said Daddy. 

“But why does it make patterns?” said Ted. “Dew is 
just round drops.” 

“Nature does many wonderful things,” said Daddy. 
“She has many different patterns. She can take a drop 
of water and make it round like a dewdrop, or raindrop. 
That is one pattern. Or she can make it look like a pearl 


A DROP OF WATER 


111 


in the garden in October. That is another pattern. Or 
she can make it look like lace in the winter time. That 
is still another pattern. It all depends on how cold it 
is. 

“The frost we see on the garden in October is called 
hoar trost. It is different from the frost which forms in 
winter, when the ground is frozen farther down. Uncle 
Rob has some pictures of frost taken under a microscope. 
We’ll ask him to show them to us. 

“Some of the frost crystals look like the stalactites in 
the Mammoth Cave you heard about.” 

“What is a crystal?” 

“A crystal is a pattern. There are frost crystals and 
snow crystals and ice crystals. They are all different. 
Uncle Bob can show us pictures of them all.” 

“I didn’t know ice came in patterns.” 

“It does. And so does snow.” 

“How big are the crystals?” 

“So small you can only see them through a microscope. 
Crystals of hoar frost often look like needles. Some¬ 
times they look like a flock of butterflies, or like a tree 
with branches. 

“Frost crystals are not like dewdrops in one way. 
Dewdrops form on the tips of leaves or blades of grass. 
Frost crystals form nearer to the ground. 

8 


112 


A DROP OF WATER 


“Frost crystals on a window-pane often look like an 
evergreen forest, like a bunch of ferns, like oak leaves, or 
like a handful of feathers.” 

After breakfast Daddy took time to show Ted just how 
the crystals form. They went to the back porch, which 
was closed in with windows in winter time. Of course 
there was no heat there, and the window-panes were 
covered with frost. 



A Design of Frost Crystal from the Land of Pointed Firs 


They took a candle and placed it near enough to the 
window-pane to melt the frost. As the frost melted, the 
center of the pane became clear, but there was a thin 


A DROP OF WATER 


113 

film of water around the edge. Then they took the 
candle away. 

At once the frost pictures began to grow. All around 
the edge fern leaves began to form and reach out toward 
the center. As soon as they got to a dry place they 
stopped. Then in between the ferns other, smaller, things 
began to form, like feathers. After awhile they stopped 
too. 

Then on the dr}’ places the true frost began to show. 
For the ferns and feathers were formed out of the 



water film already on the edges of the window-pane. But 
the true frost was formed out of the water in the air it¬ 
self. It took the form of thin lines and stars. 



114 


A DROP OF WATER 


Soon it covered all the clear space. But it never 
touched the ferns and feathers. Indeed it seemed to draw 
away from them. 

When the window-pane was covered, it looked like a 
painting. The ferns and feathers were the picture itself. 
And the lines and stars were the background. 

There are ten different kinds of window-pane frost, 
so Daddy said. But we never see all kinds at any one 
time. Besides that, no two panes of glass are covered 
with just the same patterns. 

Daddy said that was because no two panes of glass 
were just alike. One might be thicker than another. 
Or one might have dust or scratches on it. And the 
frost crystals would follow the dust or the scratches. 

Ted suddenly remembered how he and the little girl 
next door had once scratched the first letters of their 
names on the farthest window-pane. He did not tell 
Daddy, but afterward when Daddy had gone he went to, 
look. Sure enough there they were. T and M all 
trimmed up in the whitest feathers you ever saw. 

When Uncle Bob and Daddy both came home that 
night, it was snowing the most beautiful snow you ever 
looked at. Flakes of it lay on Uncle Bob’s coat and on 
Daddy’s when they came in. And outside it was like 
one big warm blanket all over everything. You could 
not feel somehow that it was cold and wet. It looked so 
beautiful and so very, very white. 


A DROP OF WATER 


115 


Yet it was cold and wet. You found that out if you 
touched it. For it melted under your touch. But just 
before it melted it looked like tiny little feathers. Uncle 
Bob said it did not look so much like feathers under a 
microscope. It looked more like stars. 

After dinner he got out his snow pictures, and Daddy 
brought the little girl next door over, so that she could 
see them too. 

There were a great many of them, and no two alike. 
Uncle Bob said that one man had worked for years 
studying snow crystals and getting pictures of them for 
the Government. And he had found thirteen hundred 
different patterns. 



A Very Symmetrical Snow Crystal 


They were mostly 
six-sided and pointed. 
It was hard to get a 
picture of a perfect 
6now crystal, because 
they were formed so 
far up in the sky 
and had to travel so 
far to get to the 
ground that many of 
them were broken. 


The snow crystals besides having beautiful shapes, had 
fine markings on them. This was because the crystal 
was hollow, and whenever there was a hollow space in- 



Il6 A DROP OF WATER 

side it was filled with 
air. This air space 
looked dark against 
the white crystal, and 
60 seemed like a mark 
or line. 

When a snow crystal 
first began away up in 
the sky, it was quite 
small and simple. But 
as it started down, it 
was caught by the wind and tossed about, back and forth 
and back and forth, but the more it was tossed, the 
bigger and heavier it grew. It kept adding points and 
lines. So the harder it 
had to fight to reach the 
earth, the more beautiful 
it was. 

Because snow crystals 
have many sides and 
points, they catch the 
light in many places. 

And because they catch 
the light in many places, 
they are very bright and very white. That is why it 
dazzles one’s eyes to look at the snow when it covers the 
earth. It catches so much of the light that it hurts one’s 
eyes to look at it. 




Jeweled Type Snow Crystal 







A DROP OF WATER 


II7 

And snow was not only beautiful, Uncle Bob said, it 
was useful too. For one thing, it would lie a long time 
on the earth and melt little by little. This would give the 
ground just the water it needed from time to time. In 
this way it was different from rain. For when it rained 
so much water would fall at once that much of it ran 
off instead of sinking in. 

Then too snow was like a blanket to keep the earth 
warm. 

“That’s just what I thought,” said Ted. “It looks like 
a blanket, a big white blanket.” 

“It is,” said Uncle Bob. “There are many seeds in the 
earth. The snow keeps them warm and gives them the 
water they need. And then when springtime comes, 
they are all ready to sprout and grow up.” 


CHAPTER XVIII 


There were other pictures Uncle Bob had to show, 
pictures of ice crystals. They looked like flowers. These 
pictures were harder to get, he said, than pictures of frost 
or snow crystals. But it could be done. 

Men who studied such 
things went about it this 
way. They took a look¬ 
ing-glass and placed it in 
the water of a brook, or 
in a pail of water in a 
cold room in the house. 
It must lie just under the 
top of the water. In this 
looking-glass they could 
watch the ice crystals 
forming, but they had to 
use a microscope to see 
them, for they were far, far too small to see any other 
way. 

When the ice crystals began to form, they showed 
first on top of the water and around the sides of the 
pail. Sometimes they sent out needles of ice from the 
sides toward the center. 

But besides these needles, there were other ice crystals 
that floated by themselves on top of the water. They 
were the most interesting and the prettiest. They began 



Ice Flower Crystal Beginning 
to Show Shading 






A DROP OF VVATFR 


JI 9 


by being just round. Then they started to form into a 
pattern. And when they were done they looked like 
flowers. 

There were five kinds of ice crystals, the needle kind, 
the star with six points, the round kind, the branching 
kind, and the kind that looked like little pillars. 

You could often see 
more than one kind in 
the same pail of water. 

And often the different 
crystals ran into each 
other and broke off each 
other’s points, so that 
few of them were per¬ 
fect. 

The ice crystals form¬ 
ed not only from the 
edge out, and on top 
of the water, but from 
the top down. This 
was a good thing, Uncle 
Bob said. Because if they had formed from the bot¬ 
tom of a stream up, the fish would freeze and die. And 
the sunshine could not get far enough down to melt the 
ice when spring came. 

But as it was, there was ice on top of a stream so we 
could skate. And yet underneath, the water was kept 



Corallike Branch Showing the 
Feather Type of Ice Crystal 



120 


A DROP OP WATER 


warm enough by the ice which covered it, to give the fish 
a chance to live through the winter. 

“What about icicles, Uncle Bob?” said Ted. “How do 
they form?” 

“Icicles are formed from melting snow. When the 
snow on the roof melts, the water drips down and takes 
much the same form as stalactites do in a cave. When 
you look at an icicle you know what a stalactite looks 
like. And when you look at a stalactite you know what 
an icicle would be like if it lasted the year round.” 

Ted thought this was all very interesting. He was still 
thinking about it when he got up the next morning. He 
ran out to the back porch to see what new patterns there 
were on the window-panes there. 

But he forgot all about the frost patterns when he got 
there. He was so surprised. Nora had set a milk bottle 
there the night before, filled with water. She had meant 
to wash it, but forgot to do so. 

When Ted got there the bottle was split right through 
and the water was frozen solid. The queer thing was 
that this solid piece of ice had not stayed in the bottle. 
It was sticking out of the top. 

“Daddy/’ he called, “Daddy. Just look at this ice. 
What makes it stick up like that? And the bottle is 
cracked clear through.” 

Daddy came to look and seemed as much interested as 
Ted. 


A DROP OF WATER 


121 


“Do you remember?” he said, “the day you had to put 
your blocks away before Mother would let you go driv¬ 
ing ?” 

Ted grinned. He never would forget that day. He 
was building a bridge when Mother called him. And 
he was in such a hurry to go that he piled the blocks 
pell-mell into the box. And of course the lid would not 
go on. 

So he pushed them around and shook them, and still 
the lid would not go on. Then he took some out and 
straightened them. And still the lid would not go on. 

And Mother just sat there and waited. And he had 
to take every block out, and put every block in again, just 
exactly where it belonged, before he could get ready and 
go driving with her. 

Mother never forgot that. And neither did he. She 
reminded him of it sometimes even now, when he got in 
too much of a hurry. 

So he laughed when Daddy spoke of it. And Daddy 

laughed too. 

“Well,” said Daddy, “When Nora put water in the 
bottle last night, it was just water. And it just filled 
the bottle. But during the night the cold weather changed 
the water into ice crystals. And ice crystals, as you 
know, have sharp points and corners. 

“These points and corners ran into each other so that 
there wasn’t room for them in the bottle, just as there 


122 


A DROP OF WATER 


wasn't room for your blocks in the box when the corners 
were turned every way. 

“Finally they pushed each other so hard that they 
split the bottle. And even then they could not find room 
enough but had to stick away out from the mouth of the 
bottle." 

“Gee," said Ted, “I didn’t know ice could do that." 

“Ice can do more than that. Ice can crack big rocks. 
Even frost can crack rocks—split them apart as if they 
had been blasted." 

“Frost?" said Ted. 

“Yes. Because frost forms crystals too, you remem¬ 
ber." 

Ted could only shake his head. 

“Ice can do as much as water, can’t it, Daddy ?’’ he said. 
“And ice is water, isn’t it ?" 

He shook his head again. It seemed so strange. He 
could not quite take it in, all at once. 


CHAPTER XIX 


It was summer again. Ted and Daddy and Mother 
were all very busy. Mother was packing and Ted was 
helping. And Daddy had a dozen things to do. For 
they were all going to Europe. 

Ted could hardly wait for the day to come when they 
were to start. And when it did come, the train seemed 
to crawl that took them to New York. 

But at last they were on board the steamship and ready 
to start. Ted wanted to look at everything at once. But 
the thing he wanted to see most was the engine that made 
the boat go. And this he had a chance to do. 

The engine itself, or set of engines, was a powerful 
thing. But what seemed more wonderful still was the 
fact that steam could make them go. 

He remembered the pictures Uncle Bob had shown him 
once of steam engines. It was just after he had burned 
his fingers in the steam from Nora’s tea-kettle. It had 
seemed strange then that a little white puff of a cloud 
could run an engine. It seemed strange now. 

And then Daddy told him how people had always 
been interested in steam. And how they had wondered 
for a great many years what it could do. He called the 
steam-engine a great invention, because an invention, 
he said, was something that people found out how to 
make for the first time. And he said that all great in¬ 
ventions were the work, not of one mind, but of many. 


124 


A DROP OF WATER 


The ancient Greeks, it seemed, knew how to use heat 
to make things go, as much as twenty-one hundred years 
ago. There was a great city in Egypt at that time, named 
Alexandria. It was named after the Greek conqueror, 
Alexander. Many learned men lived there. One of 
them, named Hero, wrote a book. In this book he told 
people about an altar. 

“This was interesting to the Greeks,” said Daddy, 
“because they worshiped many gods and built many 
altars in their honor. 

“This altar which Hero wrote about was hollow and 
air tight. Water could be poured into the bottom of it 
and a pipe led from this up to the top through a figure 
standing beside the altar holding a bowl. 

“When a fire was made on the altar, it heated the air 
inside. This heated air in trying to get out would push 
the water up the pipe until it poured out into the bowl 
which the figure was holding. 

“This made it look as if the figure was making an 
offering to the god for whom the altar had been built. 
And it pleased the Greeks greatly, for they liked to show 
much honor to their gods. 

“Altars like this may have been built hundreds of years 
before Hero wrote about them. But this is the first time 
we hear about one. And the altar he tells us about is 
the first thing we know of that was built for the purpose 
of using heat to make things go. It was really a heat- 


A DROP OF WATER 


125 


engine. And because heat is used to make steam, we 
might call it the great-grandmother of the steam-engine. 

“Hero also tells us about a temple with such an altar 
in it. A temple was a house or church built in honor of 
a god. When a fire was built on this altar it too heated 
the air inside, and so forced the water to rise. As it 
rose it flowed into a bucket. The weight of it caused the 
bucket to drop down. And because the bucket was 
fastened to the posts of the doors, it would cause the 
doors to open as it went down. Thus heat was used to 
open the doors of the temple. 

“From that time on heat was used in many ways. 
But it was not until much later that it was used to make 
steam. Indeed it was about eighteen hundred years after 
the time of Hero that a man in Italy made a machine 
something like the altar Hero wrote about. Only this 
machine used steam instead of heated air to drive the 
water out of the tube. 

“Some years after that, in England, the Marquis of 
Worcester made something which he called ‘A Fire 
Water-work.’ This was probably the first real steam- 
engine. 

“One man after another studied such small engines and 
made changes in them. One of the best-known of these 
men was James Watt. 

“Janies Watt was born in a small Scotch fishing village 
on the river Clyde. This river is known now as the 


126 


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place where many of the greatest steamships in the world 
are built. But at that time people had never heard of a 
steamship. 

“James Watt had a happy home. His grandfather 
was a schoolmaster, and quick at figures. People called 
him a great mathematician. His father, who was a 
carpenter, was elected to the highest office in the town. 
Perhaps in America we would call him a mayor. 

“But James, as a little boy, was not very strong. 
Often he was sick and could not go to school. At such 
times he liked to play with the tools from his father’s 
carpenter bench. He seemed to like tools as his father 
did. And he seemed to like figures as his grandfather 
did. 

“When he was only six years old, it is said, he could 
work out problems in geometry. And geometry is some¬ 
thing people study when they get to High School or 
college.” 

“I know,” said Ted. “Uncle Bob has a book in his 
room about ge-ge-ometry. It’s all full of lines/and 
things.” 

“Well James Watt liked to draw just such lines. Only 
after he had made pictures wfith these lines, he would 
take a knife and a piece of wood and carve out something 
that looked like the picture. 

“He made many interesting things, and for many years 
he made his living by making musical instruments and 


A DROP OF WATER 


127 


instruments used on sailing ships. During this time he 
went to Glasgow and made friends with some of the 
students in the University there. 

“One of them talked to him one day about the steam- 
engine. At once he began to study it. He kept on study¬ 
ing it for the rest of his life. He made many improve¬ 
ments on it. So many, in fact, that people almost thought 
he ought to be called the inventor of the steam-engine. 

“Other learned men joined him in his studies. They 
used to meet every month at each other’s houses. They 
met at full moon, so that those who had to come a long 
distance could drive home by moonlight. For they had 
no electric light in those days to make driving at night 
easy. 

“He lived to be eighty-three years old and when he 
died he was buried in Westminster Abbey. This was a 
great honor. For only kings or very great men are 
buried there. And James Watt was thought to be great 
because he had made steam the servant and friend of 
mankind.” 

“Are we going to Westminster Abbey?” asked Ted. 

“Yes. And when we do we’ll read what is written there 
about James Watt and what he did for the world.” 

“And then did they build steamboats right away?” 

“No, not right away. It was a good while before they 
found a way to do that. 


0 


128 


A DROP OF WATER 


“First of all they used steam in drawing up water, or 
in forcing water out of mines. Then they used it in 
factories to take the place of men or animals. 

“But all the time they were wishing they could make 
steam take the place of horses in hauling people or things 
from one place to another. Or that they could use it on 
boats, instead of depending on the wind, as sailboats 
have to do. 

“Many people studied about it. Several different men 
built engines that would go. One of the earliest was built 
by a man named Evans, and used in Philadelphia in 1804. 

“But the man who did the most to make our present 
day railroads possible was George Stephenson. He built 
his first engine in England in 1814. He is sometimes 
called ‘the father of the railroad.’ 

“People did not believe at first that engines could be 
built that would go very fast. Someone said to Stephen¬ 
son, ‘Suppose, now, one of your engines to be going at 
the rate of nine or ten miles an hour, and that a cow 
were to stray upon the line and get in the way of the 
engine. Would not that be very awkward?’ 

“ ‘Yes,’ he answered, ‘very awkward—for the cow.’ ” 

“But Daddy, that was in England. When did we have 
our first railroad in America ?’’ 

“Well,” said Daddy, looking through a book he had 
in his hand all this time, “the first rails were said to 


A DROP OF WATER 


129 


have been laid at Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1826. And 
the next between the coal mines at Mauch Chunk and the 
Lehigh River in 1827.” 

“And how many railroads are there now ?” 

Daddy laughed. “I wouldn’t try to count them if I 
were you,” he said. “The country is covered with them.” 


CHAPTER XX 


“But Daddy,” said Ted the next day, “you haven’t told 
me yet about steamboats. When did people begin to use 
them?” 

“About the same time that they first used steam-engines 
to carry people over the ground. In fact steamboats had 
been thought about before steam-engines, because people 
had always traveled across the water in boats, as far 
back as we know anything about what people did. And 
it was natural to try to use steam to make these boats go, 
instead of wind. 

“Many, many years ago people traveled in boats which 
they rowed with oars. But very soon they found that 
they could make a paddle-wheel which would turn in the 
water and do the same work as oars. 

“As much as three thousand years ago there was a man 
named Homer. He wrote a book called the Odyssey. 
And in that book he talked about ships that were self- 
moved. It almost seemed as if he were looking for¬ 
ward to the day when ships would not need oars nor 
paddle-wheels. They would move by means of a power 
within themselves. And that power would be steam. 

“As far as we know, the first time anyone really tried 
to make a boat go by means of steam was in 1543, in the 
harbor of Barcelona, in Spain. But the story about it 
says that people were afraid to ride in a boat where 


A DROP OF WATER 


131 

boiling water was used, for fear it would blow up. So 
it was not tried again for a long time. 

“In 1690 a man named Papin thought of using steam 
to turn the paddle-wheels of boats. But it was not until 
1707 that he made an engine which would really do the 
work. Then he wrote a letter to the ruler of the country 
where he lived, called the Elector. In this letter he 
asked permission for his boat to pass down the river 
through the country owned by the Elector. 

“He very soon got an answer saying that the Elector 
would not allow it. 

“This was the end of his trying to make a steamboat. 
For the other boatmen thought that their business would 
be gone if ever boats were made to go by steam. So 
they came at night and tore his boat to pieces. He him¬ 
self would have been killed, if he had not gotten away 
and gone to England. 

“In 1736, in England, Jonathan Hulls made a small 
model of a ship, which he said could be made to go into 
any port or harbor or river against wind or tide. And the 
government gave him permission to try it. That is they 
gave him a patent. But we do not find that he ever built 
a real boat like the model. And people everywhere 
laughed at him for thinking of it. 

“A little later someone in our own country tried to 
make a steamboat. His name was William Henry. He 
was born in Chester County, Pennsylvania. He learned 


132 


A DROP OF WATER 


the trade of gunsmith. When he was driven from his 
home during one of the Indian wars, he settled in the 
town of Lancaster. 

“In 1760 he went to England on business. There he 
heard about James Watt, and became much interested 
in the idea of using steam to drive boats. 

“When he came home he made a steam-engine. He 
placed it in a boat with paddle-wheels. He tried to 
make the boat go on the river near his home. But for 
some reason it sank. 

“He still believed, however, that a steamboat could be 
made which would go. And he told people that some 
day boats of that kind would be seen on the waters of 
the Ohio and the Mississippi Rivers. This proved to 
be true. 

“All this time people in France and elsewhere were 
trying too to make steamboats. And different boats 
were made in different parts of the world. All of these 
boats could be made to go at a rate of a few miles an 
hour. 

“In America there was John Fitch, who lived in Bucks 
County, Pennsylvania. He got a patent from the state 
of New Jersey, and later from Pennsylvania. In 1790 he 
had a boat carrying passengers on the Delaware River 
from Philadelphia to Trenton. 

“But probably the best-known of these early builders 
of steamboats was Robert Fulton. He was born in 


A DROP OF WATER 


133 


Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and was often at the 
home of William Henry. There he saw the models of 
boats, which Mr. Henry had made. 

“He spent some time in France and also in England. 
And he learned all he could about boats in both places. 

“In 1807 he and his partner, Mr. Livingston, built a 
larger steamer than any that had been built before. It 
was called the Clermont. The hull was one hundred and 
thirty-three feet long, eighteen feet wide, and nine feet 
deep. It was launched on the East River, New York. 
It made a trip to Albany, going one hundred and fifty 
miles in thirty-two hours. It came back in thirty hours. 

“This was the first voyage of any length made by a 
steamboat of any size. And so Robert Fulton is said to 
be the man who really made it possible for us to travel on 
the water by means of steam. 

“If James Watt could be called the inventor of the 
steam-engine, then Robert Fulton could be called the 
inventor of the steamboat. 

“From the time of Fulton on, steamboats began to 
be used everywhere. In 1812 a steam ferry-boat was 
used between New York and Jersey City. And other 
boats were built to use on the rivers in the west. 

“The War of 1812 was going on at this time. Fulton 
thought of making a steamboat which would carry guns 
and could be used in the war. Such a boat was built and 
finished in 1814. It cost $320,000. The hull was double, 


134 


A DROP OF WATER 


one hundred and fifty-six feet long, fifty-six feet wide, 
and twenty feet deep. It was called Fulton the First. 
This was the first time steam was used in the Navy. 

“A great many other men were studying steamboats 
at the same time that Fulton was. Different people 
thought of different things that could be used to make 
them better. One of these people was John Stevens. 

“Robert Stevens, a son of John Stevens, was also a 
great ship-builder. We owe much of the success of 
steamboat building to these two men. Robert Stevens 
was the first man to use hard coal in making steam.” 

“But Daddy, when did they first use steamboats to 
cross the ocean?” 

“The first steamboat to cross the ocean from America 
was the Savannah. It started from Savannah, Georgia, 
and went to St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1819.” 

“And they’ve been going ever since, have they ?” 

“Well, yes. But still it was a good while before people 
believed that they could cross safely. As late as 1838 
some people said that the only way would be to stop 
for coal either at Newfoundland or the Azore Islands. 
And yet that year two ships made the trip. 

“One started from Ireland and one from England. 
They both reached New York the same day. It took one 
of them nineteen days and the other fifteen days to 


cross. 


A DROP OF WATER 


135 


“When they reached New York people flocked to see 
them. A salute was fired by the forts. And boats of all 
kinds came out into the harbor to meet them. That was 
the real beginning of ocean travel by means of steam. 
It has never stopped since.” 


CHAPTER XXI 


There was a passenger on board the ship whom Ted 
soon got to know. People called him the Captain. 

When he was a young man he had sailed all over the 
world. He had brought tea and carved ivory from 
China and Japan. He had seen black men on the coast 
of Africa, with their skin shining in the sun; and Lap¬ 
landers up in the frozen north, who wore the furs of 
animals to keep warm. 

But he was not a young man now. His hair was 
white and his shoulders bent. And he was done with the 
sea. He was going to live with his daughter and his 
grandchildren in England. 

There was nothing, however, that he could not tell you 
about the ocean. And he and Ted became fast friends. 

Ted could not get done watching the waves. He re¬ 
membered how he and Mother and Daddy had gone in 
bathing at the seashore. And how the breakers had come 
dashing in, covered with white spray. Daddy had taken 
them out beyond the breakers where they could just feel 
the swell of the water as it rose and fell, and rose and fell. 

It was that same kind of waves that they saw now. 
And the ship as it went on its way rose and fell, and rose 
and fell with them. It was a very gentle motion, for 
they were having what the Captain called a calm passage. 

But the sea was not always calm, it seemed. Some¬ 
times the waves rose very high and washed clear over the 


A DROP OF WATER 


137 


decks of ships. Then the passengers got frightened and 
went below. Ted hoped this would not happen to the 
ship they were on. 

“What makes waves, anyhow ?” he asked. 

Wind,” answered the Captain. “The wind is always 
blowing somewhere.” 

“I wonder what makes the wind blow.” 

The Captain could explain this too. “Heat,” he said. 

“Warm air,” he went on, “is lighter than cold air. And 
so it rises. Then the cold air rushes in below to take its 
place.” 

Ted remembered this. He remembered how a cold 
wind blew out from the mouth of a cave. And how the 
warm air rose like steam from the top. 

“This can happen anywhere,” said the Captain. “And 
whenever it happens it starts the wind to blowing. But 
besides these winds that may blow anywhere, there are 
certain winds that blow from one direction all the time. 
We call them trade winds. 

“You know that the earth is round like a ball.” 

“Yes,” said Ted. “And it keeps turning all the time.” 

“It does. It spins like a top. On the middle of the 
top, as it spins, the sun shines all the time. We call 
that part the equator. It is very hot there. 

“But at the top and the bottom the sun does not shine. 
We call these parts the North and the South pole. It 
is very cold there.” 


138 


A DROP OF WATER 


“I know,” said Ted. “I learned that in school.” 

“And so,” said the Captain, “there is heated air rising 
from the equator, and cold air rushing in from the poles 
to take its place. But the wind does not come straight 
down from the north, and straight up from the south. 
Can you guess why?” 

Ted shook his head. 

“For the very reason that we just talked about. The 
earth spins so fast that it turns the winds a little out 
of their course. It makes them blow from the north-east 
and the south-east. These are the trade-winds.” 

But there was something else Ted learned about 
stranger even than waves and trade-winds. It was the 
Gulf Stream. 

“The Gulf Stream, ” said the Captain, “is a river in the 
ocean.” 

“A river!” cried Ted. 

“Yes, a river bigger than the biggest river that flows 
through any land.” 

“But—but—it couldn’t flow through water.” 

“Yet it does. Its banks are cold water. And its 
bottom is cold water. But the Gulf Stream itself is 
warm. It starts in the Gulf of Mexico, and it flows 
towards the North pole.” 

Ted thought that this could not be. But he found it 
to be so, because one day it was very warm on shipboard. 
Mother took off the furs she had been wearing and put 


A DROP OF WATER 


139 


on a summer dress. People talked about the change of 
weather. But the Captain said they were crossing the 
Gulf Stream. 

Ted wanted to know all about it. 

“The Gulf Stream/’ said the Captain, “is so different 
from the ocean that it is even of a different color. For 
some distance after it starts it is a deep blue. And you 
can see it flowing through the light green water of the 
ocean. It carries seaweed with it too. 

“About half-way up there is a place in the ocean where 
this seaweed collects. More than four hundred years 
ago Christopher Columbus set out from Europe to see 
if there might be another land across the sea. When he 
came to this place, his men thought that they could go 
no farther. It was so covered with seaweed that it looked 
as if they could get out and walk on it. They were sure 
that the ship could not sail through it. But it did. And 
at last they found the land we call America. And there 
were only Indians living on it then. This place filled 
with seaweed is called the Sargasso Sea.” 

“Is that the end of the Gulf Stream?” 

“Oh, no indeed. It keeps on flowing north until it 
comes to the Banks of Newfoundland. Here it meets a 
cold stream of water coming down from the North pole. 
This cold stream of water often carries icebergs. These 
icebergs are melted by the warm waters of the Gulf 
Stream. And the earth and stones and gravel in them 


140 


A DROP OF WATER 


pile up on the Banks of Newfoundland. This piling 
up of stones and gravel year by year has made the banks 
of Newfoundland very high.” 

“Does the Gulf Stream stop there?” 

“No, it turns from there to the east and flows across 
towards Ireland. Ireland, as you know, is one of the 
British Isles. England and Scotland are the other two. 
Here the Gulf Stream divides . Part of it goes north and 
is lost in the frozen seas. The other part goes south and 
is lost in the warm waters of the Bay of Biscay.” 

“Where is the Bay of Biscay?” 

“Off the coast of France.” 

“Is it warm in France?” 

“Yes. It is warmer than that part of America which 
is just across the ocean from it. And the British Isles 
are warmer too. If we could throw a stone straight 
across the ocean from Ireland it would hit America north 
of the United States, away up in Canada. They have 
very cold weather there. Yet in Ireland the weather is 
so mild that the grass is green most of the time. It is 
as green as an emerald. So people have called Ireland 
the Emerald Isle. 

“Another thing that makes the grass so green is that the 
air is very damp. For the air rising from the warm Gulf 
Stream has much water in it. So the weather, or climate 
as we say, of the British Isles, is warmer and damper than 
that of America.” 


A DROP OF WATER 


141 


“Gee,” said Ted. “That’s funny.” 

“What kind of heat do you have in your house?” asked 
the Captain. “Hot water?” 

“Ye-yes,” said Ted. He wondered what the Captain 
meant by such a queer question. 

“And you have a furnace in your cellar, haven’t you?” 

“Yes.” 

“Well, the Gulf Stream is very much like your heating- 
plant. The furnace is the equator. The Gulf Stream is 
the water in the pipes. It reaches all the way to England, 
Ireland and Scotland. The people there know it does 
because they sometimes find drift-wood on their shores 
that has come all the way from the Gulf of Mexico. 

“And they are very glad that nature has built such a 
splendid heating-plant to give them a good climate.” 


CHAPTER XXII 


Ted often wondered what made the ocean look so 
different at different times. Sometimes it was blue, and 
sometimes green. On a dark day it was just a kind of 
dull brown. 

The Captain said it all depended on the way the sun 
shone on it; and that a glass of sea water was just as 
colorless as any other kind of water. 

He said that there w r ere many things though that might 
make it look different. If the water was shallow and 
there was white sand at the bottom, it would be a light 
green. If the sand vras yellow, it would be a deeper 
green. If there were rocks below, the water would look 
darker. Indeed sailors often found out where the rocks 
were by watching the color of the water. 

He said too that some bodies of water were named 
according to their color. The White Sea was named white 
because of the ice in it; and the Black Sea black, because 
of the storms which often made its waters look black. 
The Red Sea was so called because of a red plant which 
showed through the water. 

Another thing the Captain told Ted about was the 
saltness of the sea. Of course Ted knew that the sea 
was salty because all the rivers flowing into it had carried 
with them some of the soil or rocks over which they had 
come. Daddy had told him that. But there was more 
to learn. 


A DROP OF WATER 


143 


The Captain said that there was also something sticky 
in sea water. This was because of the plants and the tiny 
animals that had died there. 

He said too that the sea was more salty near the 
equator, and less salty near the poles. And that the great 
Mediterranean Sea was more salty than the ocean. 

The Black Sea, he said, had less salt than the ocean. 
And the Dead Sea had so much salt that a man could 
float on its waters without sinking, like a cork in a bath¬ 
tub. It was six times saltier than the ocean. 

This saltiness of the ocean was a good thing, he said, 
because it helped the ships to keep afloat. It also helped 
the streams in the ocean, such as the Gulf Stream, to 
flow. It also kept the water from freezing. For salt 
water does not freeze as soon as fresh water. This is be¬ 
cause salt helps the rays of the sun to find their way down 
into the water and warm it. 

There was another strange thing to be learned about 
the ocean. That was its tides. They were caused, the 
Captain said, by the sun and by the moon. 

He said that the sun and the moon tried to draw the 
water up from the earth. Of course they could draw it 
only a little way. But the moon could draw it farther 
than the sun. This was because the moon, although 
smaller than the sun, was nearer to the earth. 

But with all their drawing, the best they could do was 
to cause two pairs of waves to rise. These two pairs of 


10 


144 


A DROP OF WATER 


waves travelled right around the earth, wherever there 
were oceans. 

If there were nothing but oceans, they could keep right 
on travelling. But when they ran against the land, they 
just dashed high up on the beach and then rolled back 
again. 

“Oh, I know,” cried Ted. “When we were at the 
seashore we couldn’t go in bathing late in the afternoon 
because the water was too high.” 

“Exactly,” said the Captain. “That was high tide. 
And when you did go in, in the morning, it was low tide. 
This thing of high tide and low tide is caused by the 
drawing power of the sun and moon.” 

“Does the water do that everywhere?” 

“Everywhere more or less. In the South Sea Islands 
the tide hardly rises higher than the length of your arm. 
But in the Bay of Fundy it rises fifty feet or more, as 
high as a house. 

“Once a ship was cast upon a rock near there. When 
morning came the sailors found themselves and their 
ship away up in the air, with the water far below them. 
You see it was low tide by that time.” 

“Gee,” said Ted, “that was funny.” 

“When the tide strikes the shore with a great swishing 
noise, it is called surf. This surf is very strong in some 
places. If there is a high wind, the surf is just so much 
the stronger. 


A DROP OP WATER 


l 


145 


“When the water is gathering itself up to strike the 
shore, it is called a billow. These billows are sometimes 
very high. They look like great green mountains. And 
just before they strike, they curl over at the top and send 
the spray dashing away up on the beach.” 

“I know,” said Ted. “I’ve seen them.” 

“Away down at the lower end of Africa, at the Cape 
of Good Hope, the billows are so high sometimes that one 
ship cannot be seen from another ship, if there is a billow 
between them. They rise as high as forty feet. 

“Even where the billows are not so high, they can 
dash very hard if something gets in their way. In the 
English Channel there is a great tower. It is called the 
Eddystone Lighthouse. A very bright light burns there 
to warn the ships of the rocks, and to guide them into the 
Channel. 

“Sometimes the waves strike it so hard that the spray 
rises one hundred and thirty feet into the air and falls 
back on the roof of the lighthouse. 

“If the waves dash in between rocks, they form what 
we call whirlpools. These are very dangerous to ships. 

“There is a famous one which the old Greeks knew 
about. It is formed between two rocks which they called 
Scylla and Charybdis. They were very much afraid of 
this whirlpool.” 

Ted thought that this was very interesting. But in a 
minute he forgot all about it. For everyone was crowd- 


146 


A DROP OF WATER 


ing to one side of the deck, and he and the Captain went 
too. 

They wondered what was the matter. They soon found 
out. It was an iceberg the people were looking at. 

Ted was so excited that he could not keep still, but kept 
jumping up and down. For there in the distance was a 
great white mountain of ice. It was said to be two hun¬ 
dred and fifty feet high. 

Ted wondered what would happen if it ever struck the 
ship. The Captain said it could crack a ship as easily 
as you could crack an egg. But of course it did not 
strike the ship, for they kept out of its way. 

It was wonderful to look at though, so white and daz¬ 
zling. And where there were cracks in it, it was a deep 
blue. 

Strangest of all, the Captain said, they were only look¬ 
ing at the top of it. The biggest part of it was under 
the water. 

As long as they could see it, they watched it. And long 
after that Ted kept thinking about it. It was the most 
wonderful thing he saw on the trip across. 


CHAPTER XXIII 


“How deep is the ocean?” asked Ted one day. 

The Captain smiled. 

“A good many people have wondered about that,” he 
said, “for a good many years.” 

“Is there any way to find out?” 

“Yes, in some places.” 

“How do they do it?” 

“They have tried to do it in several ways. Time and 
again sailors from their ships have dropped a line over¬ 
board. They thought that in this way they could measure, 
or as we say fathom or sound, the sea.” 

“And could they?” 

“Not if they were far out. If they were near shore the 
lead at the end of the line would touch bottom. Then 
they knew how deep the water was in that place. 

“But when they got away out upon what sailors call 
‘blue water/ this way of measuring or fathoming the 
ocean would not work at all.” 

“Why not?” 

“Because when the line got down a certain distance it 
was caught by the streams of the ocean and carried this 
way and that. It never reached bottom at all.” 

“That’s queer,” said Ted. 

“They tried every way they could think of. They used 
a cannon ball for a weight. They used twine and they 
used silk for a line. But they never could touch bottom. 


148 


A DROP OP WATER 


“They even fastened a kind of screw to the weight in 
such a way that it would measure the number of times 
it turned in going down. By counting the number of 
turns it made they thought that they could tell how far 
down it had gone. 

“This worked very well in shallow water, but not out 
in the middle of the ocean. For if they used a small line, 
they could not draw it up. And if they used a heavy 
line they could not make it go down. 

“They tried other things too. They sent down gun¬ 
powder. This, they thought, would blow up, or, as we 
say, explode, at the bottom of the sea. And by noticing 
how long it took for the sound of that explosion to reach 
them, they could tell how far down it was. 

“But they never heard it at all. Doubtless the gun¬ 
powder did explode down there at the bottom of the sea. 
But with so much water in between, no sound of it ever 
came up to the top. 

“It seemed as if old ocean was laughing at them. Try 
as they would, they could not make her give up her 
secrets. 

“But all this trying did some good. People learned a 
good deal about the streams in the ocean. If they could 
not reach the bottom, they at least learned where they 
could not reach it and why they could not reach it. 

“And all the time men were working, trying to make 
better and better lines to sound or fathom with. At last 


A DROP OF WATER 


149 


someone made the best one of all. It was not really a 
line at all. It was an iron rod. This rod passed through 
a cannon ball. And at the bottom of the rod there was a 
cup filled with soap. 

“This was put together in such a way that when it 
struck the bottom, the cannon ball would come loose and 
stay there. The iron rod with its cup of soap could be 
drawn up. 

“In the cup of soap, sticking fast to it, could be found 
any little plants or animals which happened to be on the 
bottom where it struck. In this way they found out two 
things; where the bottom of the ocean was in any par¬ 
ticular place; and what was on the bottom of the ocean 
in that place. 

“My,” said Ted, “wish I could see some of those 
things. Then they really did find out how deep the ocean 
is.” 

“In some places. The deepest place they could measure 
was just south of the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. 
That is the place you remember, where the Gulf Stream 
turns and where the cold Polar stream comes down. And 
where the earth and stones and gravel from the ice¬ 
bergs pile up. 

“It is deeper still farther east. But no rod has ever 
been made that could measure it. The deepest place 
that has been fathomed is five miles.” 

“Five miles?” cried Ted. “Five miles deep?” 


A DROP OF WATER 


150 


“Five miles deep,” said the Captain. 

“Five miles?” Ted still could not believe it. This 
ocean underneath them five miles deep! 

The Captain smiled. 

“Did you ever stop to think,” he asked, “what the 
bed of the ocean would look like if we could drain ofif the 
water ?” 

“No,” said Ted. 

“Well,” said the Captain, “it would look like a big 
gash in the earth. Suppose you took an apple, which is 
round like the earth, and cut a piece out of it right down 
to the core from the stem end to the blossom end. That 
would look something like this gash in the earth. For 
it is cut probably from the North pole to the South pole. 

“Only it is not a clean cut such as you would make 
with your knife. It is very rough and jagged. That is 
why there are mountains and valleys and plains in the 
ocean.” 

“Mountains?” 

“Certainly. When you come to a shallow place in the 
sea you are crossing a mountain. When you come to a 
deep place you are crossing a valley. If the mountain 
is very high, it may stick clear up out of the water. Then 
it is called an island.” 

“Gee,” said Ted. “I never thought of that.” 

“If we could look into this gash in the earth, we should 
see many wonderful things. We should see the bones 


A DROP OF WATER 


I 5 I 

of animals such as we never saw living on the earth. And 
the timbers of ships that have sunk. 

“We should see pearls and precious stones; and plants; 
and shells which once held living animals.” 

“Held animals ?” 

“Yes. Didn’t you know that shells were the homes of 
animals ?” 

“No.” said Ted. 

“I’ll tell you what happened years ago. People had 
learned to send messages from one place to another by 
means of wires strung across the land. They called 
these messages telegrams. And they called the wires 
telegraph wires. 

“Then they wanted to send messages across the ocean 
in the same way. But they could not do it because there 
was no place on which to hang the wires. 

“So they thought that they could put the wires inside 
of a twisted cable, and lay that cable on the floor of the 
ocean, if they could find a place high enough to reach. 

“They made soundings with the iron rod I told you 
about, and found that there was such a place between 
Cape Race in Newfoundland and Cape Clear in Ireland. 
They called it a plateau, because a plateau means a high 
level place. And because they could send telegrams by 
means of the cable which they laid, they called it the 
telegraphic plateau. 


152 


A DROP OF WATER 


“This cable has been a wonderfully good thing, because 
now people can send messages back and forth from one 
side of the ocean to the other whenever they want to. 

“But besides that, another good thing came out of it. 
The iron rod with its cup of soap brought up sand or clay 
from the bottom of the sea. This sand or clay was sent 
to learned men in America and in Europe. 

“They looked at it through the microscope and found 
it was not sand nor clay at all. It was a kind of dust 
of sea shells. These shells were so small you could not 
possibly see them except through the microscope. And 
yet in each shell an animal had lived. 

“This was the first chance they had had to look at 
such shells. And they studied and studied and studied 
them. They felt that if they could just go down and 
look at the bottom of the sea they could read a great big 
story of life on the earth. For there the story of the 
shells is written. 

“We think that there are many birds flying through 
the air. And many animals walking about on the earth. 
But these birds and these animals are as nothing at all 
to the little living things in the ocean. There are millions 
and millions of them. And they are hidden from us 
forever by the waters that cover the sea.” 

The Captain stopped and looked away out across the 
water. His eyes were as blue as the sea itself. And the 
look in them was as far away as the farthest waves. He 


A DROP OP WATER 


153 


was saying something to himself. It sounded like “the 
works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep.” What¬ 
ever could he be talking about? 

Suddenly he turned. “Child,” he said, “do you know 
the names of the oceans?” 

“Ye-yes sir,” said Ted. “I—think so.” 

“Let’s name them.” 

So they named them together. Atlantic, Pacific, Artie, 
Antarctic, and Indian Oceans. 


CHAPTER XXIV 


Ted kept wondering about those living things in the 
ocean. One day the Captain told him about them. 

First they took a drop of water and looked at it under 
the microscope. It looked just cloudy at first. Then 
they saw that there were things floating and swimming 
about in it. Some of these things were plants and some 
were animals. They were so small you could not see 
them at all without the microscope. 

The Captain said that there were millions of these little 
plants. They grew as close together as trees in a forest. 
And the little animals could swim all around through 
them, just as birds fly about the trees up on the land. 

“These little animals not only swim around,” he said, 
“but they also fight with each other. They try to catch 
each other. And sometimes they kill each other. 

“They also stop swimming sometimes and catch hold 
of the rocks beneath them. There they build houses for 
themselves and live in them. When they die their houses 
stay right there on the rocks. 

“And then some day, perhaps, when the tide goes out, 
the rocks near shore lie bare. And boys and girls wade 
out and gather these little houses from the rocks, and 
bring them in and play with them. 

“Or a diver dresses up in his diving suit and goes 
down into the ocean. He has to wear heavy lead shoes 
or he could not stay on his feet in the water. And he 


A DROP OF WATER 


155 


has something round on his head, called a diving-bell. 
This has glass in it for him to see through. And there 
is a tube fastened to it. Through this tube he gets fresh 
air to breathe. 

“He gathers up all the little houses or shells that he 
can, and then he pulls a cord. The people up above know 
then that he is ready to come up. So they pull him up 
quickly. And they take the shells and send them to the 
men who study such things. 

“These men do not always agree about the things 
that live in the ocean. Sometimes they look at some¬ 
thing which floats in water, and one man says it is a 
plant, while another says it is an animal. 

“There are plants which float about so freely that they 
seem like fish swimming. And there are little animals 
which hold so tight to the rocks that they seem like plants 
growing. 

“You cannot tell them by their shape either, for they 
have no arms nor legs. Not even heads, perhaps. It 
is very hard to tell where plant life ends and animal life 
begins. 

“The best way to study some of these plants and 
animals is to put them into a large tank. We call this 
lank an aquarium.” 

“I know,” said Ted. “I’ve been to the Aquarium in 
New York.” 

“What did you see there?” 


A DROP OF WATE)R 



“Why—why—just seaweed. And little fishes/’ 

“There is much more to see if you stay long enough. 
Indeed you could spend your whole life—if you wished 
to—just studying seaweed.” 

Then the Captain showed him pictures of life in the 
ocean taken under the microscope. There were kinds of 
seaweed that looked like moss, or like ferns. Indeed 
seaweed, he said, was the moss and the ferns of the ocean. 

And then the little animals! There was one kind that 
grew by dividing itself in two. This he saw under the 
microscope himself. It was the shape of a bean. After 
awhile it grew narrower in the middle. At last it grew 
so narrow that it came apart entirely. Then there were 
two beans instead of one. 

It was very queer. But this was not the end of it. 
For each of these two beans, the Captain said, would 
make two more. And those two, each two more. And 
so on—and so on— 

“Why, I should think,” said Ted, “the ocean couldn’t 
hold them all.” 

“Well,” said the Captain smiling, “you must remember 
they are very small.” 

He looked at the Captain and then at the microscope. 
He had forgotten all about that. He had been as in¬ 
terested in them as if they had been cats or dogs. And 
yet they were so small that you could not see them 


A DROP OF WATER 


157 


without a microscope. They had a queer name. He did 
not try to remember it. 

But there was another kind he could remember easily. 
These were the sponges. He knew what a sponge was 
because the little girl next door had one. She had a slate. 
She would draw pictures on it. Then she would take 
her sponge and fill it with water and wash off the pictures. 

The sponge held a great deal of water. Sometimes 
it dripped all over her clean dress. Then Jane would 
scold her. And she would cry. He wished he could 
see the little girl next door. He wished he could see her 
right now. He wanted to tell her all about the sponges. 

It was a long time, it seemed, before people could 
tell whether a sponge was an animal or a plant. It grew 
fast on the rocks like a plant. Yet it had openings in it, 
and through these openings it seemed to breathe. So 
they decided at last that it was an animal. 

Yet it was the strangest kind of animal, for it never 
moved from the rocks where it was fastened. What¬ 
ever it got to eat, it got from the water around it. It 
could not swim off to hunt food. It almost seemed to be 
half-way between a plant and an animal, if such a thing 
could be. 

It had no head nor arms nor legs. All it had was 
openings through it. In and out of these openings the 
sea water flowed. And from the sea water it got its 


A DROP OF WATER 


158 

food. So you might call it an animal that was all 
stomach. 

A sponge might be small or large. There were more 
than two hundred different kinds that people had counted. 
Some were very small indeed. And some grew as high 
as Ted’s head, so the Captain said. 

But they were all alike in one thing. They could hold 
water. And so, many years ago, people began to gather 
them. They used them to wash things off with, just as 
the little girl next door washed off her slate. 

Some sponges grew in shallow water. These they 
could reach with a long-handled fork. But the finest 
ones grew in deep water. Here a diver would go down 
with a knife and cut them off. Many people made their 
living by fishing or diving for sponges and selling them. 

There were little animals which could sting you like 
a nettle, if you touched them in the water. There were 
others which looked like little umbrellas floating about. 

There were some that lighted up the sea when they 
floated on it. These were joined to each other, and their 
bodies glowed like lamps, so that at night when they 
rose to the top they looked like long ribbons of fire. 

But the most interesting of all were the ones who made 
coral. Ted had often seen coral. Mother had a piece 
of it lying on her desk at home. It looked like a branch 
of a tree, only smaller. And it was very white. If he 


A DROP OP WATER 


159 


bad thought about it, he would have said that it was a 
branch from some plant. 

Other people used to think that too, the Captain said. 
One day a man put a branch of it in a vase of water. 
He thought he saw flowers on it, and he wanted to see 
them bloom. 

But they were not flowers at all, he found. They were 
animals. And they had built the branch on which they 
lived. 

This was strange enough. But the Captain told him 
something stranger still. He said that they not only built 
small branches. They built whole islands too. 

“Islands?” said Ted. 

“Yes, islands big enough for people to live on.” 

“Why, how could they?” cried Ted. “How big are 
they ?” 

“Not big at all. So small that you would need a 
microscope to study them.” 

“And they build islands?” 

“Yes, they can do it because there are so many millions 
of them.” 

“How do they do it?” 

“Well, they begin by taking hold of the rock. Then 
they build out branch after branch. They keep on build¬ 
ing, round and round, and round and round. The coral 
above grows out of the coral below. And finally the 
island comes up out of the ocean.” 


11 


160 A DROP OF WATER 

“Does it look all white like the coral on Mother’s 
desk ?” 

“No, not all white. For sand and seaweed and other 
things gather there. The ocean brings them. And seeds 
are dropped there too. So that after awhile plants and 
trees grow up. And when you see a coral island it looks 
much like any other kind of island.” 

“Gee,” said Ted, “that’s queer.” 

“There are many kinds of coral. But it is only found 
in the warmer seas. Here men go fishing for it, just 
as they fish for sponges.” 

The Captain showed Ted some coral. He was taking 
it to his grandchildren in England. Some of it was red 
and some was pink and some was white. He gave Ted 
a piece of the red coral to take home with him. 

The time was growing very short now. Soon they 
would be in England. Ted was almost sorry. There 
were so many things still to be talked about. 

He wanted to ask the Captain about sword-fish and 
cuttle-fish and all the other kinds of fish he had never 
seen. And about whales and where they come from. 
But there was not time enough for everything. 

And so they said goodbye. And the Captain went one 
way to see his grandchildren and their father and mother. 
And they went another to begin their trip through Eng¬ 
land. 


CHAPTER XXV 


Ted and Daddy and Mother saw many interesting 
things in England, and also in Scotland and Wales. 
They saw the river Clyde, where so many big steamships 
are built. And they saw the tomb of James Watt, who 
made steamships possible, in Westminster Abbey. 

There were kings and queens and other great men 
and women buried there. And people must have thought 
that James Watt was a great man too. For the words 
on his tomb said that the king and the people of England 
had placed it here, not to make others remember his 
name, for his name could not be forgotten. But that 
they had placed it there to do honor to a man who was 
a real friend to mankind. 

From England they went to France. After that they 
went to Italy. Here Ted saw many things that he had 
only heard about before. He saw a great volcano. And 
he saw what the lava from it looked like after it was 
cold and hard. 

They bought a little pencil made of lava. They also 
bought a string of Naples coral. It was lovely and pink. 
Ted was going to take it home to the little girl next door. 

He wished he could see the little girl. He had so 
many things to tell her. He was afraid he might forget 
them before he got home. 


162 


A DROP OF WATER 


But the country he took the most interest in was 
Switzerland. It was so different from any place he had 
ever seen before. 

There were high mountains there called the Alps. 
These mountains divided Switzerland from Italy. They 
were very high indeed, and the top of them was covered 
with snow. 

There was a tunnel through them, and the train went 
through this tunnel. But years ago, so Daddy said, there 
was no tunnel there. Then people had to climb to the 
top. This was dangerous, because the snow was deep. 
And sometimes travellers would get lost in it. They 
might have frozen to death there but for one thing. 

On top of the mountain was a place built in honor of 
a very holy man. This man was named St. Bernard, and 
he had died many years before. 

To this place travellers could come and rest and get 
warm. And there they kept dogs. These dogs were 
trained to go out into the snow and look for travellers. 
If anyone lost his way, the dogs would find him. If he 
fell, the dogs would drag him up and bring him in. 

They had a chance to see some of these dogs. They 
were very big and shaggy. And they had blue eyes. 
Mother said they were just dear, and she wished she 
could hug them. But Daddy said they were fat and lazy 
because they had nothing to do. 


A DROP OF WATER 


163 

Ted was glad they had nothing to do. He was glad 
that he and Mother and Daddy dod not have to climb the 
mountain and get lost in the snow, but could go straight 
through it on a railway train. 

People did climb mountains though in Switzerland. 
They did it on purpose. And it was very hard to do, 
because the mountains were so high and so slippery with 
ice and snow. 

There were men called guides who made a business of 
taking people up these mountains. They would tie the 
people together with ropes. Then the guide would go 
ahead with a sharp-pointed stick. He called this stick 
an Alpinestock. 

He would stick it into the snow to steady himself as 
he climbed. And the whole party would climb after him. 
Daddy wanted to go with a party right away. But Mother 
would not let him. 

There were lovely lakes too in Switzerland. One of 
them was called Lake Lucerne, and one, Lake Geneva. 
There were many others too, besides these. They were 
all very deep. 

Lake Lucerne was green, while Lake Geneva was very 
blue. This was because the water in Lake Geneva was 
very pure. In Lake Lucerne there was plant life, which 
gave it its green color. 


164 


A DROP OF WATER 


There were rivers too in Switzerland. Two of the 
principal rivers of Europe begin, or rise, in the moun¬ 
tains there. These rivers are the Rhine and the Rhone. 

Ted was interested in these because he remembered 
how a river cuts its path. He could almost watch a 
river doing it here. 

Because of the high mountains the streams run very 
fast. One of them, which goes on to join the Rhine, has 
cut a deep valley, almost a gorge. High up on the banks 
of it are little towns. These towns are in danger. The 
rocks are cracking underneath them. That is because the 
river is cutting the rocks away so fast. 

In another part of the River Rhine there are steps 
which the river has built along its banks out of the mud 
which it has carried and left there. Ted remembered how 
Daddy had told him about this once. 

On these steps people had built houses. But after 
that the river began cutting down its path so fast that 
the steps crumbled. Then they had to move their houses 
back to get them on safe ground. 

All these things made Switzerland seem like a strange 
and wonderful country. Daddy said it was a wonderful 
country. He said it was like a page out of the story of 
the earth. This was because it showed so plainly the 
work of glaciers. 

“Glaciers?” said Ted. 

“Yes. Do you know what a glacier is?” 


A DROP OP WATER 


165 


“No,” said Ted. 

“A glacier is a river of ice.” 

“A river of ice! But a river of ice couldn’t move.” 

“It does though. Very slowly. But it moves.” 

And then Daddy told him a long story about glaciers 
that went away back to the beginning of things before 
any people lived on the earth. 

“In the first place, while the crust of the earth was 
still cooling, it formed in folds or ridges. This was be¬ 
cause it was driven up and down and sideways by the 
heat. It may have looked something like a cake baking 
in the oven. 

“One of the folds or ridges hardened into these moun¬ 
tains, called the Alps. They may not be just the same 
shape now that they were then, because many things 
have happened to them since. But they have been here 
ever since that time. 

“After the steam which once covered the earth cooled 
ofif, it became water. After the water cooled enough it 
became ice. This ice was found not only at the North and 
the South poles, where there is always ice now. It was 
found in other places too. 

“There was what was called an ice age, when ice 
covered nearly the whole of Europe and of our own 
country of America. We know this in different ways. 
It left marks upon the rocks which we can see to-day. 
And it left traces of plants and animals, which live only 


A DROP OP WATER 


166 

near the North or South poles. If there had not been 
very cold weather and a great deal of ice, they could not 
have lived there. 

“It seems that the ice melted and the country had 
warmer weather once more. For we find the remains of 
plants and animals which live in a warm climate. Then 
later it froze again, and again melted. This may have 
happened two or three times. 

“But at last it melted and never froze again, except 
in the mountains or in countries where they would natur¬ 
ally have cold weather. If we want to know though what 
the ice looked like in those countries which are now 
warm, we have only to look at a glacier. And there is 
no place where we have so good a chance to look at a 
glacier as in Switzerland.” 

And then they went one day as near as they could to 
the end of a glacier. It was indeed a river of ice. And 
where the ice melted and ran down, a river of water 
began. The River Rhone began this way, Daddy said, 
and so did many other rivers. 

These mountains, the Alps, were very high. And the 
valleys in between were narrow. The ice was almost 
shut in by the mountains, and moved slowly through the 
deep narrow valleys. 

The glacier they looked at ended in an arch of ice. 
Out of this arch came the water of the river. It was 
formed by the constant melting and dripping of the ice. 


A DROP OF WATER 


The arch looked solid. It looked as if you could walk 
across it. But Daddy said that that would be dangerous. 
He said that sometimes in summer it would crumble and 
fall with a crash. 

Near to the arch were piles of little stones. The 
glacier had carried these down and left them there when 
it melted. They were called moraines. 

“A glacier always does that,” Daddy said. “And 
wherever we find such piles of stones, we know that 
sometime there has been a glacier there.” 

Farther up, where the ice had not melted, they found 
many beautiful shapes. It looked as if some giant had 
tried to carve figures out of the ice, and had piled them 
up there for everyone to see. 

This was because the ice was broken in sliding down 
between the sides of the valley or gorge. 

After awhile they came to a little hut on the moun¬ 
tain, where they stopped and rested. Then they went 
on along the mountain side until they came to a place 
where they could cross the glacier. 

It seemed very strange to walk across a river of ice. 
But the guide said it was safe enough, if they did just 
what he told them to. There were big cracks in the ice. 
These were called crevasses. But the cracks were not so 
big as they got nearer to the other side. At first the 
ice was dirty. Afterward it was clean and white like 


snow. 


i68 


A DROP OP WATER 


When they got to the other side they climbed a steep 
mountain. Here the view was beautiful. But they did 
not stay there. They walked on up. 

Coming down the slope was a little glacier. It was 
going on to join the big one, just as a small stream 
joins a river. There was a big rock on it. While they 
looked this rock loosened and went rolling down over the 
ice. This is the way a glacier carries rocks, big and 
little, and leaves them where they fall. 

To the right was a big crack in the rocks. In this 
crack was a pillar of stone. The guide led them to this 
pillar. It was a very hard climb, but he knew just how 
to get there. 

From there they could see the whole glacier below. 
They found that it branched out into three parts. In 
some places it was a smooth white river of ice. In other 
places there were frozen waterfalls that reminded you of 
Niagara. 

When they got back again to their hotel, Daddy said 
that some people climb much higher than they had gone. 

“When they do that,” he said, “they find all kinds of 
ice mounds and ridges. They find deep cracks or 
crevasses too. Some of them they can hardly cross. 

“Sometimes they have to use an axe. They cut steps 
in the ice and climb up by means of them. When they 
come to a crevasse, they can sometimes cross it on a 
bridge of snow. But this is dangerous. For the snow 
may crumble and throw them down into the crevasse. 


A DROP OF WATER 


169 


“Men have taken great risks in order to find out all 
they can about glaciers. They have walked along narrow 
ice walls with deep crevasses on each side. They have 
seen the blue light shining up from these crevasses under 
the blue sky above. 

“They have crossed a frozen glacier to an island where 
flowers bloomed. They have looked at the great moun¬ 
tain near it. And down this mountain they have seen the 
snow roll with a noise like thunder. 

“Such a snowslide is called an avalanche. The guides 
are careful to keep out of the way of one. If they did 
not, the snow might bury them. 

“Men have found out too, how fast a glacier moves. 
Once a man built a hut on the ice. This hut moved, and 
he kept watch of the distance it went. It took it three 
years to move three hundred and thirty feet. 

“It was found that the middle of a glacier moves 
faster than the sides. Just so the middle of a river flows 
faster than the sides. But it would take a glacier some 
time to catch up with a river, wouldn’t it? When it 
only moves a hundred feet or so in a year. One man 
who measured it said that a glacier moved less than two 
inches a day. 

“Sometimes the men who were watching a glacier 
would hear sharp sounds like pistol shots. After awhile 
they would find out what caused it. It was the ice 
cracking from the bottom up. The crack would be very 


I/O 


A DROP OF WATER 


small at first. But as the sun shone on it and melted the 
ice, it would grow bigger and bigger. Finally it would 
become a crevasse too wide to cross. 

“A large crevasse is beautiful. It always has that 
strange blue light in it. And icicles hang over the edge, 
as long sometimes as thirty feet. 

“Sometimes they found a square stone standing away 
up like a table on a pillar of ice. This was because the 
sunshine could not get through the stone to melt the ice 
underneath. So it melted the ice all around, and left 
just the pillar of ice holding up the stone. 

“People have studied glaciers not only in Switzerland, 
but also up in the Artie ocean near the North pole. Here 
the ice moves slowly too until it reaches the warmer 
water of the Atlantic or the Pacific ocean. Then it 
melts and big pieces of it break off. These pieces are 
the icebergs that float in the sea.” 

“Oh,” cried Ted, “like the one we saw?” 

“Exactly. An iceberg is the broken end of a glacier.” 

There was something else that was interesting to see in 
Switzerland. There were rocks so round and so polished 
that you felt that they must have been carved on purpose. 
Glaciers had carved them, Daddy said. 

The ice had ground them, round and round, and round 
and round, and then left them. There were no glaciers 
near them now. But there had been once. 


A DROP OF WATER 


171 

Ted thought that this was very strange. But Daddy 
said that you could find these round rocks in many places. 
You could find them in America right near home. And 
you knew that wherever you found them there had once 
been a glacier. 

It made Ted feel queer to think that the countries 
which are now warm had once been covered with ice. 
“How long ago was that, Daddy,” he asked. 

“Oh, many thousands of years ago. Perhaps before 
there were any people living on the earth.” 

Ted began to feel queerer than ever. He did not like 
to think about a time when there were no people living 
on the earth. He liked people. 

He liked rocks and rivers and clouds and glaciers. But 
he liked people best of all. 

And he liked people that he knew. He liked Uncle 
Bob and Nora and the little girl next door. He wanted 
to see them—right now. 

He wondered how the hollyhocks looked. And if that 
opening in the hedge was still there. He wanted to go 

straight home and find out. 

************* 

It was still there. 

Uncle Bob met them at the boat. And Nora met them 
at the front door. 

And then Ted ran through the house and out into the 
yard. The hollyhocks were still blooming. The open- 


172 


A DROP OF WATER 


ing in the hedge looked just the same. The little girl was 
there too. Even that everlasting doll was there also. 

She dropped the doll when he put a little white box into 
her hand. 

Then he began to talk about everything at once, coral 
islands and the Captain and St. Bernard dogs and 
crevasses, all in one breath. 

She did not hear a word of it. 

“Don’t you wish you’d seen them ?” he asked. 

She had the box open by this time. 

“Oh, oh, oh,” she cried, dancing up and down. 

“Are you glad to see me back?” 

She turned and raced for the house, the box in one 
hand, the string of coral in the other. 

“Daddy, Mother, Jane,” she called. 

Ted raced after her. 

“Did you miss me?” he said. 

The door banged after her. He never did find out. 


SCIENTIFIC BOOKS 


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ARNDT-KATZ -A Popular Treatise on the Colloids in the Indus¬ 

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Pages VI + 73. 

ARNOLD -The Motor and the Dynamo. 8vo. Pages VI 4- 178. 

166 Figures. 

BENEDICT -Elementary Organic Analysis. Small 8vo. Pages VI 

. 4 - 82. is Illustrations. 

BERGEY— Handbook of Practical Hygiene. Small 8vo. Pages 164. 

BILTZ -Practical Methods for Determining Molecular Weights. (Trans¬ 
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BOLTON— —History of the Thermometer. i2mo. Pages 96. 6 Illus¬ 

trations. 

BRYDEN AND DICKEY -A Text Book of Filtration. 8vo. Pages 

XII + 376. 264 Illustrations. 

BURGESS— Soil Bacteriology Laboratory Manual. i2mo. Pages VIII 
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CAMERON— The Soil Solution, or the Nutrient Medium for Plant 
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CLINTON— Further Light on the Theory of the Conductivity of Solu¬ 
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DOLT -Chemical French. 2nd Edition. 8vo. Pages VIII 4 * 413. 

EMERY —-Elementary Chemistry. i2mo. Pages XIV 4 ~ 666. 191 

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90 Illustrations. 

FRAPS -Principles of Agricultural Chemistry. 8vo. 2nd Edition. 

Pages VI 4 - 501. 94 Illustrations. 

GILMAN -A Laboratory Outline for Determination in Quantitative 

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GUILD -The Mineralogy of Arizona. Small nmo. Pages 104. Illus¬ 

trated. 

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HALLIGAN -Fertility and Fertilizer Hints. 8vo. Pages VIII . 4 - 156 

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HALLIGAN— Soil Fertility and Fertilizers. 8vo. Pages X 4 - 398 
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HARDY -Infinitesimals and Limits. Small i2mo. Paper. Pages 22 

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HART -Chemistry for Beginners. Small iamo. Vol. I. Inorganic 

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HART -Second Year Chemistry. Small i2mo. Pages 165. 31 IHus 

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HART -Our Farm in Cedar Valley. i2mo. Pages 250. Illustrated 

HART, R. N. -Leavening Agents. 8vo. Pages IV . 4 - 90 . 13 Ulus 

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HILL- A Brief Laboratory Guide for Qualitative Analysis. 3rd Edi 

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HOWE -Inorganic Chemistry for Schools and Colleges. 8vo. 3rd 

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JONES -Thr Freezing Point. Boiling Point and Conductivity Methods. 

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KRAYER -The Use and Care of a Balance. Small iamo. Pages 

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LEAVENWORTH— Inorganic Qualitative Chemical Analysis. 8 vo. 

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LE BLANC-The Production of Chromium and Its Compounds by the 

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LOCKHART—American Eubricants. 2nd Edition. 8vo. Pages XII 
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MASON— Notes on Qualitative Analysis. 8th Edition. Small i2mo. 
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MEADE——Chemists’ Pocket Manual. i2mo. 3rd Edition. Pages IV 
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MEADE—Portland Cement. 2nd Edition. 8vo. Pages X + 512. 169 

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MOELLER-KRAUSE—Practical Handbook for Beet-Sugar Chemists. 

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MOISSAN—The Electric Furnace. 2nd Edition. 8vo. Pages XVI 

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NIIvAIDO -Beet-Sugar Making and Its Chemical Control. 8vo. Pages 

XII -{- 354. 65 Illustrations. 

NISSENSON— The Arrangement of Electrolytic Laboratories. 8 vo. 
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NOYES -Organic Chemistry for the Laboratory. 4th Edition, revised. 

8vo. Pages XII + 293. 41 Illustrations. 

NOYES AND MULLIKEN -Laboratory Experiments on Class Reac¬ 
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PARSONS— The Chemistry and Literature of Beryllium. 8vo. Pages 
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PFANHAUSER -Production of Metallic Objects Electrolytically. 8 vo. 

Pages 162. 100 Illustrations. 

PHILLIPS -Chemical German. 2nd Edition. 8vo. Pages VIII 4 - 252. 

PHILLIPS -Method for the Analysis of Ores, Pig Iron and Steel. 

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PRANKE -Cyanamid (Manufacture, Chemistry and Uses). 8vo. Pages 

VI -i-112. 8 Figures. 

PULSIFER -The Determination of Sulphur in Iron and Steel—With 

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SEGER -Collected Writings of Herman August Segar. Papers on 

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STILLMAN -Briquetting. 8vo. Pages XI + 466. 159 Illustrations. 

STILLMAN -Engineering Chemistry. 5th Edition. 8vo. Pages VIII 

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STILLMAN -Examination of Lubricating Oils. 8vo. Pages IV 4 125. 

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WILEY-Principles and Practice of Agricultural Analysis. Vol. I— 

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WINSTON-Laboratory Leaflets for Qualitative Analysis. 8 x 10. 10 

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WYSOR-Analysis of Metallurgical and Engineering Materials—a 

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WYSOR Metallurgy—a Condensed Treatise for the Use of College 

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